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"By the time Congress is back in session and ready to take up gun control, Newtown will be fading a little in the public memory. It’s hard to imagine it now, but that’s what’s happened after every mass shooting of the last several years. The gun-rights advocates will be as single-mindedly impassioned as they always are, and the rest of us will be thinking of other things. But rallies and marches and demonstrations could remind those who’ve forgotten of what happened, serve to back up the members of Congress who want to do something about guns, and signal that there are numbers and votes on the other side as well. It’s simple—but it matters."
— Margaret Talbot on the importance of taking gun control to the streets: http://nyr.kr/R4l9qD -
On February 18, 1981, a student at Occidental College, Barack Obama, delivered his first public speech. As the opening speaker at a rally protesting Occidental’s investments in companies that were doing business in apartheid South Africa, he stood with one hand in his pocket, spoke in declarative spurts, and showed no sign of being the orator who would become President nearly twenty-eight years later. Before he could say much, he was carried off by two students pretending to be oppressive Afrikaners.
I was a student at Occidental then, too. So was Tom Grauman, a sophomore who took thousands of photos for the Office of Communications, a selection of which can be seen in the slide show above. Many of Grauman’s photographs documented formative events and influential people in Obama’s life at that time, including Obama’s friends and fellow-organizers Hasan Chandoo and Caroline Boss, his friends Wahid Hamid and Laurent Delanney, and two activists, Earl Chew and Sara-Etta Harris, who spoke at the rally and who later appeared in the composite characters Marcus and Regina in “Dreams from My Father.”
Click-through for a slideshow of never before seen photos of Obama, and for more from Margot Mifflin on the anti-apartheid demonstration: http://nyr.kr/SCPxTG
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Shouts and Murmurs: “My Week at Chick-Fil-A,” by Billy Kimball: http://nyr.kr/PYdHKZ
Photograph courtesy Chick-fil-A.
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Should Olympic Athletes be Protestors, Too?→
What, if any, responsibility do athletes have to use their time in the spotlight to take a stand? http://nyr.kr/MpQ8rd
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"Akunin describes himself as a reluctant political activist, someone who prefers solitude and doesn’t have much faith in human nature. He likened the situation in Russia to the Wild West, where ranchers must band together to hunt down cattle thieves, even if they would rather tend their herds in peace. “We realize, finally, it is our country,” he said. “When something like that happens, if you can do something, you do it, otherwise you feel bad afterward.” Navalny called Akunin’s role in the protest “essential.” In addition to the author’s popularity, “the most important thing about Boris Akunin is his sense of style,” Navalny wrote. “He is the one to feel the atmosphere and catch the agenda, detect it and give it [direction]."
— Sally McGrane on Russia’s dissident detective novelist, Boris Akunin: http://nyr.kr/LSlbz1 -
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.
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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
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This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done.
It’s the wrong lesson… Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.
What Stonewall got right, and Occupy got wrong: http://nyr.kr/L8gITl
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Like Sobchak, Yashin, Navalny, and the others whose homes were searched on Monday morning were all handed a summons to appear at the offices of the Investigative Committee at 11 A.M. on Tuesday, which was conveniently just an hour before the start of that days’ anti-Putin rally where all of them were supposed to speak. They all showed up, and dutifully answered the same fifty-six questions about who organized the May 6th violence, how it was planned, and who financed it. Sobchak’s interrogators made her read aloud the statement she had prepared with her lawyer—she’d hoped to save time and make it to the rally—frequently asking her to slow down, rewind, and repeat.
“The whole point was to just keep me there the whole day, to keep me from going to the protest,” Navalny said of his time with his interrogators.
Russia cracks down opposition leaders including Alexey Navalny and Kseniya Sobchak: http://nyr.kr/LXdxiX
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I doubled back past a group of giggling private-school girls to look at the exhibit again. A blank wall lit by a spotlight remained where “The Spear” had hung. Murray’s art is often irritatingly obvious about his disappointment with what he views as the A.N.C.’s greed, cronyism, and abuse of power: wall sculptures in red and gold with bling and dollar signs on top of revolutionary slogans and images of Zuma; paintings that appropriate anti-apartheid prints and change demands for freedom to demands for cars and mansions. We get it, I felt like saying.
Alexis Okeowo writes on South Africa’s most hated art gallery, the Goodman Gallery: http://nyr.kr/Lkeraz
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Julia Ioffe reviews the new production of the classic Russian opera “Boris Godunov” in St. Petersburg, and finds protest theatre in Putin’s Russia http://nyr.kr/JHdGVR
