A Question of Identity
Jeremy Lin’s sudden stardom has also put the spotlight on how Asian Americans are viewed in the U.S.:
“Not since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has there been so much national discussion about the appropriateness of discussing race. The 2008 election set the groundwork for an aggressive sort of colorblindness — as long as you voted for Barack and/or can celebrate, say, Jackie Robinson, you now have the right to flag down anything that might shake us from our post-racial dream. Statements like ‘I see everybody equally, therefore everyone should just talk about him as a basketball player’ and accusations of ‘playing the race card’ have become even more ubiquitous. And although the former signals a nice sentiment, it also provides convenient cover for those of us who benefit most from the status quo, regardless of race. Yes, Jeremy Lin became Linsanity because he has been playing at a level that has recalibrated expectations of any obscure player. And yes, there’s nothing more tiresome than a long-winded meditation on a basketball player, especially if he’s clearly been hijacked to promote some other agenda. But to strip Jeremy Lin of his status as the Great Yellow Hope not only seems dishonest and lazy, it also deprives the community he represents — willfully or not — of the unabashed joy of seeing one of its own succeed in the most improbable arena.”
The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge
Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks:
“In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went down. He had even sent a tip about one of the outages to Valleywag, an industry gossip blog, which ignored his e-mail. If YouSendIt’s servers were still running the way he had left them, he believed, the site wouldn’t be crashing. At YouSendIt, Shaikh had been the subject of what he calls ‘senseless, mindless pressure’ to keep the servers running. Now, no one seemed to care.
“So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt’s servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt’s Wikipedia page: ‘Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down.'”
Thirty Seconds from Now
[Fiction] A student juggles the present and the future:
“The future is messy. Scott’s senses feed him all possible futures at once. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead. That’s close, but it’s still not normal. This man, though, is a relief to his senses. He makes everything clean. Scott wonders for how long he can ogle the man and if he’ll ever walk by the room again. He untethers his senses, and the future rushes in.
“Thirty seconds from now, the man, when he turns to leave, will see Scott juggling. He will rip the flyer he posted off of the bulletin board. The dorm room door will bounce against the closet wall when he knocks on it. A boom will punctuate the bounce. The man will stare at the door, chagrined. Scott finds him even more like a teddy bear from the front.”
Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong
William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:
“Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.”
Whitewashing Gay History
[Not single-page] Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like to remember:
“It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American artist who had already been silenced, long ago, by AIDS. It was a Democratic president, with wide support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most discriminatory laws ever to come out of Washington. It’s precisely because of DOMA that to this day same-sex marriages cannot be more than what you might call placebo marriages in the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized them. DOMA denies wedded same-sex couples all federal benefits—some 1,000, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs—and allows the other 42 states to ignore their marriages altogether.”
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled:
“We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate I am on a regular basis, I can keep this job. ‘Do you think this job has to be this terrible?’ I ask the workamper.
“‘Oh, no,’ she says, and makes a face at me like I’ve asked a stupid question, which I have. As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere.”
The Big Reveal
The Book of Revelation is the Bible’s “Hollywood ending”—but author Elaine Pagels’ new book explores what the author originally intended:
“Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the ‘Left Behind’ books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look.”
David Sharrett’s Family Still Wants Justice for Friendly Fire Death in Iraq
A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished:
“A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the ‘fog of war.’ They were confident in the Army’s promises of transparency and accountability for the lieutenant who fired the fatal shot.
“Then came the third knock on the door.
“After a memorial service for their son at Fort Campbell, Ky., in February 2009, soldiers who fought alongside him paid a surprise visit to the Sharretts. In a cramped room at the Holiday Inn Express, the soldiers used words such as ‘cover-up’ and ‘lies.’ They brought video recordings shot from aircraft high above the chaos that showed how Dave Sharrett II and two other American soldiers were killed.”
The Lost Party
How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party:
“That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of the explanation lies in Romney’s lameness as a candidate, in Santorum’s strength, and in the sudden efflorescence of social issues in what was supposed to be an all-economy-all-the-time affair. But even more important have been the seismic changes within the Republican Party. ‘Compared to 2008, all the candidates are way to the right of John McCain,’ says longtime conservative activist Jeff Bell. ‘The fact that Romney is running with basically the same views as then but is seen as too moderate tells you that the base has moved rightward and doesn’t simply want a conservative candidate—it wants a very conservative one.'”
The Girls at the Front
A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:
“Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were ‘mini– training camps’ and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. ‘We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,’ says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing ‘Horse Killer Pass.’ Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. ‘It’s my party patch,’ says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. ‘I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.'”
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