Politics
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Manning and Lamo, Wikileaks, and the Public Interest
In 2007, an American Apache helicopter operating in Iraq killed 12 Iraqi citizens, including two Reuters journalists. The event was kept from the American public for months, the film footage of the attack classified.
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Tortured
“I fallen in love with u from just talking 2 u. What do u think justine. My wife has already left me.” The text message above was sent to author Justine Sharrock by one of the ex-soldiers she interviewed for…
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“Until quite recently, to be Irish meant to be not-English.”
“My march to the bookies, my filling out the docket and handing it over the counter with my cash: this was going to be my post-post-colonial moment. I’d sit through the month and cheer England’s progress because I, like my…
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Your Conflict iPhone
“An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Nicolas Kristof…
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Jessa Crispin on Wisdom
“But there’s a difference between admiring wisdom and emulating it. That’s perhaps the best illustration of the difference between knowledge and wisdom: We know the value of wisdom. We know that narcissists should not be in charge of industries that…
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The Reptilian Brain
“We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of…
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The Spill and Melville
“But much like the modern petroleum industry — which began in the late 1850s, making it only slightly younger than Melville’s novel — whaling quickly came up against the limits of its resources.” The spill in the Gulf, the here…
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Tortured Confessions: The Rumpus Interview with Justine Sharrock
In her book Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things, journalist Justine Sharrock takes a close look at low-ranking soldiers who engaged in acts of torture.
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Michael Chabon on Mavi Marmara
“This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of Goodbye, Columbus from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid…
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BPGlobalPR
“Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.” “You don’t go drilling 5000 feet underwater with the tools you want, you do it with the tools you…
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bodies at rest
Sarah Fran Wisby responds to San Francisco’s Sit/Lie proposition criminalizing homelessness. ** I come not to bury the sponsors of the proposed Sit/Lie aka Civil Sidewalks ordinance, but to praise them, and to call attention to a potential side benefit…
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The Deep Dark Shades of BP’s Gulf Oil Spill
The oil-drenched marine life preparing to testify on Barry Blitt’s June 7 New Yorker cover did not make me smile in the slightest. (I doubt humor, even the dark kind, was Blitt’s core intent.) It’s an effectively painful riff on…