To return to any place is, associatively or figuratively, to reconstruct any event that happened at that place—especially if it’s a personally or universally defining event. To acutely mark that spot with an architectural artifact like a monument or memorial makes it impossible to miss, but also denies us the architectural setting of everyday life that enabled—or witnessed—that event in the first place. And such monuments can also seem, all too easily, to relieve us from our duty of further recollection and reflection. To demolish whatever stood at a place may seem like erasing that place’s defining event from history. But, conversely, to restore a place too completely to some earlier state can become a form of erasure, a denial that any disruption has ever happened. 
…

Shootings, events defined by immediate sightlines and ballistic trajectories, are an especially spatial and architectural kind of violence, and some ineffable part of their violence is to space itself—to the very airspace or geographical coördinates at which shots were fired or taken. The architectural task in the long aftermath of such shootings is not only to repair structural damage but to calibrate a balance between remembering and forgetting sufficient for daily life to continue nearby—and to figure out how the shapes, materials, and details of buildings can participate in that calibration. The architectural task is not only to provide actual security and defensibility but to figure out how the ways you see and move through buildings can affect your feelings of being at risk or at home.

Thomas De Monchaux talks to Erlend Haffner of the Oslo design firm Fantastic Norway, who has been hired to rebuild the summer camp on Utoya Island, which was the site of a mass shooting in July, 2011, about the process of rebuilding violent places: http://nyr.kr/16c0vKo

Photograph: Courtesy Fantastic Norway.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, last December, there has been much public discussion about the necessity of greater vigilance regarding mental-health issues—about our ability to recognize red flags early and get potentially dangerous individuals into treatment. It’s a reassuring notion, and less divisive, certainly, than calls for greater gun control or for censoring video games. But, as the [Amy] Bishop story [which I recount in a piece the current issue of the magazine (“A Loaded Gun”)] makes clear, this kind of early-warning system is often difficult to institute in practice. Amy Bishop shot her own brother, after all. She punched a woman at a pancake restaurant. She stood accused of mailing a bomb to one of her supervisors at Harvard. Red flags don’t get much brighter than that. Yet nobody stepped in. Why not?

Continue reading Patrick Radden Keefe on gender-bias in the criminal-justice system: http://nyr.kr/YhD78p

Today, the event is essentially a tool of legislative strategy. It’s no longer just an occasion for the President to present the details of his agenda to Congress and the public, though every President does do that. The real purpose now is for the President to take advantage of the unusual opportunity of having his political opponents before him as a captive audience. While the President can’t actually make Congress vote for any of his proposals, on this one night he can make every congressman and senator squirm as they are forced to decide, in public, whether to applaud for each of his ideas…

Ryan Lizza on the State of the Union address, and Obama’s new rallying cry: http://nyr.kr/VfMfvz

John Cassidy on “President Obama’s carefully plotted campaign speech, thinly disguised as a State of the Union address”: http://nyr.kr/X71G71

This is a year when the President needed to use the State of the Union to offer a coherent counter-argument to the Republican raging against government in all its forms. He succeeded reasonably well, with the help of [a word], one that gave the speech its emotional force: guns.

Amy Davidson on guns and government in Obama’s address: http://nyr.kr/XzOmuH

(Photographs: 1. Charles Dharapak/AFP/Getty Images 2. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images  3. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.)

(Source: newyorker.com)

Amy Davidson asks, as Sandy Hook’s children go back to school, are we losing our focus on what we need to do about guns? Click-through to read: http://nyr.kr/Una3Kr

Photograph by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)