-
Mariana Cook’s portrait photography seems to corroborate the old myth of the camera as a soul-stealing machine. Her eye is warmly enveloping, yet also sharp and efficient—like an emotional pickpocket, she removes crucial human essences and stores them on film. One can only imagine the deft charm she must employ to get these photographs, which are marked by gestures and gazes and oddities that the viewer immediately knows to be characteristic of their subjects. In her many books of portraiture—among them, “Coupes,” “Generations of Women,” “Mothers and Sons,” “Fathers and Daughters”—Cook presents images alongside text, distilled from interviews she conducts with the people in the photos. The interplay between the photographer’s vision of her subject and the subject’s account of herself produces a simultaneous sense of precision and of mystery: How much can we really see of a person? How much can they really see of themselves? Cook seeks, with a kind of patient force, to know as much as she can.
Cook’s recent books concentrate on people in specific fields—“Faces of Science,” “Mathematicians,” and the newly published “Justice,” which portrays human-rights activists—and how their personalities relate to their work. In her preface to “Justice,” Cook explains the questions she posed as she embarked on the project:
How do people come to feel so passionately about fairness and freedom that they will risk their livelihoods, even their lives, to pursue justice? A few years ago, I became fascinated by such people—people for whom the “rule of law” is no mere abstraction, for whom human rights is a fiercely urgent concern. I wanted to give a face to social justice by making portraits of human rights pioneers. I am a photographer. I understand by seeing. Peering through the camera lens, I hoped to gain an understanding of how they become so devoted to the rights and dignity of others.
Here are some selections from “Justice.” http://nyr.kr/10F485H
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
When A Criminal Leads a Country
Have we started to lose faith in the very idea of humanitarian law?
In today’s Daily Comment, Steve Coll writes about Syria, the International Criminal Court, and justice: http://nyr.kr/XUzEy5
-
“Clearly there are plenty of troubling questions surrounding the Obama Administration’s targeted-killing program.” But, Jane Mayer asks, “are Obama’s drones comparable in terms of human-rights violations, to Bush’s Torture program?”
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XLGfeJ
(Source: newyorker.com)
-
As the doctors cautiously revealed the details of injuries inflicted on the young woman, who needed a gut transplant as her intestines had been torn by iron rods, thousands of students from colleges and universities in the city gathered in a spontaneous protest in Delhi. Anger spread like a heat wave. In my years in Delhi as a student and a reporter, the protests against the various instances of sexual assault would be attended and lead by left-leaning women’s organizations student groups. India’s conservative middle and upper-middle classes mostly stayed home. This was different…
Basharat Peer on the fury in Delhi after the rape and murder of the 23-year old unnamed victim: http://nyr.kr/YSQPOw
Photograph by Rakash Singh/AFP/Getty.
-
"But the most surprising fact about the debate’s discussion of China—and the one that tells us the most about the new relationship taking shape the world’s two greatest powers—was that neither candidate in uttered the words, “human rights” in relation to the People’s Republic. That used to be a standard feature… The absence of a discussion of human rights will not go over well in the American human-rights community or with Tibetan groups. For the moment, however, in Beijing it is being greeted with pleasure. China takes careful note of vocabulary—the Foreign Ministry keeps track of the mentions of specific words—and the erosion of human rights from the candidates’ priorities will be taken as a sign, as foreign-affairs specialist Zhu Feng put it, that economic issues are “something they really care more about now than human rights or security."
— Evan Osnos on China, trade, and human rights in last night’s Presidential debate. Read more. -
"Is “kill or capture” a policy, or are the words just a screen for politically convenient targeted killings?"
— Steven Coll on Obama’s troubling targeted-killing policy: http://nyr.kr/OLccPZ(Source: newyorker.com)
-
"I really resent you using the word 'torture'": Q & A with Jose Rodriguez→
Jose Rodriguez spent more than thirty years with the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually serving as the director of its Counterterrorism Center. He was involved in the Agency’s detention-and-interrogation program, which included holding prisoners in black sites and waterboarding them. Rodriguez wrote a book about his career, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” which I’ve written about and discussed in a Q. & A. with Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent (and the subject of a Profile by Lawrence Wright). Rodriguez and I discussed his book and the choices he and the C.I.A. made in e-mail and phone exchanges
Click-through to read Amy Davidson’s conversations with Jose Rodriguez: http://nyr.kr/LZbBfd
-
Ethiopia’s current rulers were once freedom fighters, not so different from South Africa’s A.N.C. They promised to do things differently and to be accountable to their people. Now, they risk turning into freedom’s enemies, criminalizing peaceful means for Ethiopians to exercise their constitutional rights, such as freedom of expression or freedom of association.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault on the dangerous case of Ethiopia’s imprisoned blogger, Eskinder Nega: http://nyr.kr/Q2TDZd
-
In 1973, two social scientists, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, defined a class of problems they called “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are messy, ill-defined, more complex than we fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based on one’s point of view. They are problems such as poverty, obesity, where to put a new highway—or how to make sure that people have adequate health care.
…
Solutions to wicked problems …are only better or worse. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Unanticipated complications and benefits are both common. And opportunities to learn by trial and error are limited. You can’t try a new highway over here and over there; you put it where you put it. But new issues will arise. Adjustments will be required. No solution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or wholly satisfying, which leaves every solution open to easy polemical attack.
Atul Gawande on why universal health-care in the United States is a wicked problem, and why the uninsured are still vulnerable: http://nyr.kr/MDJqA8
-
In today’s Daily Comment, Amy Davidson asks “what’s wrong with politicizing the death of Osama bin Laden?” She writes,
The list of questions that we have had to confront practically, not just abstractly, reads like a catechism of citizenship. When should we go to war? What are the limits of habeas corpus? What are our priorities— financial, moral, military— as a nation? What are the rights of citizens, and of strangers? What do Congress, the Court, and the President each get to decide? How much can we know about what they do? Is torture worth it? What are my rights? Should we sneak into South Asian countries and assassinate our enemies in the middle of the night? These are all matters for politics. And, again, in the past decade there haven’t been too many questions raised about them; there were again, too few. And too often the critics were told to just be quiet and keep national security out of politics.
Click-through to read Davidson’s entire post.
