The Thin Red Line
Inside the debate over what the U.S. should do about Syria:
“He walked back to his desk and sat down. ‘The Syria I have just drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole,’ he said. ‘I think there is an appreciation, even at the highest levels, of how this is getting steadily worse. This is the discomfort you see with the President, and it’s not just the President. It’s everybody.’ No matter how well intentioned the advocates of military intervention are, he suggested, getting involved in a situation as complex and dynamic as the Syrian civil war could be a foolish risk. The cost of saving lives may simply be too high. ‘Whereas we had a crisis in Iraq that was contained—it was very awful for us and the Iraqis—this time it will be harder to contain,’ he said. ‘Four million refugees going into Lebanon and Jordan is not the kind of problem we had going into Iraq.'”
Midnight In Dostoevsky
[Fiction] Two college friends speculate about a stranger in town:
“We were two sombre boys hunched in our coats, grim winter settling in. The college was at the edge of a small town way upstate, barely a town, maybe a hamlet, we said, or just a whistle stop, and we took walks all the time, getting out, going nowhere, low skies and bare trees, hardly a soul to be seen. This was how we spoke of the local people: they were souls, they were transient spirits, a face in the window of a passing car, runny with reflected light, or a long street with a shovel jutting from a snowbank, no one in sight.”
Death of a Revolutionary
The life and death of pioneering feminist Shulamith Firestone:
“Midway through the service, the feminist author Kate Millett, now seventy-eight, approached the dais, bearing a copy of ‘Airless Spaces’ (1998), the only book that Firestone published after her landmark manifesto, ‘The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution,’ which came out in 1970. Millett read from a chapter entitled ‘Emotional Paralysis,’ in which Firestone wrote of herself in the third person:
“She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.
“Clearly, something terrible had happened to Firestone, but it was not her despair alone that led Millett to choose this passage. When she finished reading, she said, ‘I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.’ It was hard to say which moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.”
The Thinking Molecules of Titan
[Fiction] A previously unpublished sci-fi story by the writer and film critic, who died on April 4 at age 70:
“‘This is a vague idea,’ said Regan. ‘I’m still working on it. Titan evolves molecules that group in such a way that they, oh, get together, like, and don’t actually communicate, like, but prowl around in non-self-conscious collective-information patterns. That’s what we’re hearing, now that we’re closer to the source.’
“‘There’s only one way this is going,’ Alex said. ‘A lunar intelligence.’
“‘Intelligence is not required,’ Regan said. ‘All that’s needed are patterns that move more easily than other patterns. Patterns that lend themselves to pattern-originators. The way of least resistance. We don’t like sulfur, but it’s yummy for the deep-sea plumes.'”
The Master
At Horace Mann—the prestigious Bronx private school rocked by allegations of sexual abuse from the 1960s into the 1990s—former students recall a pattern of abuse from one eccentric English teacher:
“And what about Mr. Berman—this odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him? He wasn’t mentioned in the Times stories, but he may have been the greatest enigma of all. I talked to more than a hundred alumni, to many teachers who worked with him in the sixties and seventies, and to administrators who dealt with complaints about teachers. Berman stood out for his extraordinary control over boys’ lives. Several of his former students have spent decades trying to grasp why they yearned to be close to him, and why they remained silent for so long after, by their accounts, he abused them. ‘Berman counted on everyone’s silence,’ one of the men who lived with him after graduating from Horace Mann told me. Like some of the others, he asked not to be named. ‘He assumed that our own humiliation would keep us quiet,’ he said.”
The Woman of the House
[Fiction] Two men are hired to paint a couple’s farmhouse in Ireland:
“They were distantly related, had been together in the farmhouse since his mother died, twelve years ago, and his father the following winter. Another distant relative had suggested the union, since Martina was on her own and only occasionally employed. Her cousin—for they had agreed that they were cousins of a kind—would have otherwise had to be taken into a home; and she herself had little to lose by coming to the farm. The grazing was parcelled out, rent received annually and now and again another field sold. Her crippled cousin, who since birth had been confined as he was now, had for Martina the attraction of a legal stipulation: in time she would inherit what was left.”
Danse Macabre
A history of politics and betrayal at Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet—and an investigation into the acid attack on Bolshoi artistic director Sergei Filin:
“The liquid was sulfuric acid—the “oil of vitriol,” as medieval alchemists called it. Depending on the concentration, it can lay waste to human skin as quickly as in a horror movie. Scientists working with sulfuric acid wear protective goggles; even a small amount in the eyes can destroy the cornea and cause permanent blindness.
“Filin was in agony. The burning was immediate and severe. His vision turned to black. He could feel the scalding of his face and scalp, the pain intensifying all the time.
“‘In those first seconds, all I could think was, How can I relieve the pain?’ Filin told me later. ‘The burning was so awful. I tried to move. I fell face first into the snow. I started grabbing handfuls of snow and rubbing it into my face and eyes. I felt some small relief from the snow. I thought of how to get home. I was pretty close to my door. There’s an electronic code and a metal door, but I couldn’t punch in the numbers of the code. I couldn’t see them. When I understood that I couldn’t get into the building, I started shouting, “Help! Help! I need help!” But no one was around.'”
Summer of ’38
[Fiction] A Spanish woman revisits a wartime romance:
“The week after Ana had mentioned the man from the electric company, Montse saw him waiting at the front door of her building when she came home with a bag of fruit. She did know him, she realized; he was someone she often saw on the street. She must have been aware, too, that he worked for fecsa, although she couldn’t think how she knew this. She didn’t think she knew his name or anything else about him.
“Once he had introduced himself, she realized that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. She was unsure about this. Since Paco died, she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises. She even asked her daughters to phone at appointed times. But there was something both eager and easygoing in this man’s manner and she knew that it would sound rude if she asked him to say whatever he had to say in the hallway of the building.”
Up All Night
How the modern workday affects how we choose to sleep:
“Wolf-Meyer refers to the practice of going to bed at around eleven o’clock at night and staying there until about seven in the morning as sleeping ‘in a consolidated fashion.’ Nowadays, adults are expected to sleep in this manner; anything else—sleeping during the day, sleeping in bursts, waking up in the middle of the night—is taken to be unsound, even deviant. This didn’t use to be the case. Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, ‘Americans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.’ They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their ‘first sleep’ and rattled around—praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their ‘second sleep.'”
The Embassy of Cambodia
[Fiction] A maid from Ivory Coast works in northwest London:
“The only good thing that happened in Carib Beach was this: once a month, on a Sunday, the congregation of a local church poured out of a coach at the front gates, lined up fully dressed in the courtyard, and then walked into the pool for a mass baptism. The tourists were never warned, and Fatou never understood why the congregants were allowed to do it. But she loved to watch their white shirts bloat and spread across the surface of the water, and to hear the weeping and singing. At the time—though she was not then a member of that church, or of any church except the one in her heart—she had felt that this baptism was for her, too, and that it kept her safe, and that this was somehow the reason she did not become one of the ‘girls’ at the Carib Beach Resort. For almost two years—between her father’s efforts and the grace of an unseen and unacknowledged God—she did her work, and swam Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn, and got along all right. But the Devil was waiting.”