“Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” is a three-part exhibition of photographs from the Walther Collection, curated by the South African scholar Tamar Garb, with works that range from late-nineteenth-century photographs from southern Africa to pictures by present-day African and African-American artists. The final installment of the series, “Poetics and Politics,” is currently on view at the Walther Project Space, in Chelsea.

Click-through for a slide show of photographs from “Distance and Desire,” with captions abbreviated from the catalogue, followed by a Q. & A. with Garb: http://nyr.kr/10VCuoK

(Source: newyorker.com)

   Judith Thurman on “a startling literary coincidence” in the work of Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson: http://nyr.kr/15Q9EoV

(Source: newyorker.com)

Reconciliation at My Lai: Dan Kaufman on Vietnam veteran Mike Boehm’s homespun humanitarian-aid efforts in My Lai: http://nyr.kr/10cKCym

Photograph of Mike Boehm and Phan Van Do, a language teacher and translator, by Le Phuong Trung.

  Peter Manseau on America’s history of “melancholy accidents,” or, the gunfail of our forebears: 

The power of #gunfail (and, when its victims are not children, its black humor) is found in its predictability: today or tomorrow, sure as a cartoon time bomb, there is bound to be another bang. Yet its haunting quality is not merely a matter of the sad certainty of fatal accidents stretching far into the future. It’s also about our collective past. We have been failing with guns for so long, there ought to be a way to hashtag history. If we could, a narrative would emerge of a nation that fancies itself created and sustained by guns but that, in fact, sees its people culled by them with unnerving frequency.

…

Inadvertent suicides and other firearm-induced injuries were so frequent in early America that a regular report of “melancholy accidents”—the #gunfail of our forebears—could be found in newspapers across the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though these reports also took note of drownings and horse-tramplings, guns provided their assemblers with the most pathos per column inch…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Y1MxYH

(Source: newyorker.com)

As we celebrate—what, no longer being there?—let’s spare a moment for Iraq, and the Iraqis…

Continue reading Jon Lee Anderson’s reflection on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war: http://nyr.kr/14crdUd

Photograph: Alex Majoli/Magnum.

HOUSTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a sombre ceremony attended by former members of the Bush administration, the former Vice-President Dick Cheney marked the tenth anniversary of making up a reason to invade Iraq. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/13883iE

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon by Jack Ziegler. For more: http://nyr.kr/XbiVUU

Ten years after the bombing of Baghdad and the start of the Iraq war, Seymour Hersh asks, what’s up with our Constitution? “How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush… so quickly throw us over the cliff? It’s not enough to blame it on the fear, anger, and confusion brought on by the 9/11 attacks… Is our Constitution that fragile?” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/ZBToV5

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum. See more images from “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq.”