I could never have asked him what exactly Abrahim had done for him, or what their relationship had been like, but I had never asked him anything to begin with, not about his past, his current intentions, or his plans for the future. By the time I was old enough to be genuinely curious about what type of man my father had been before I knew him, I had made up my mind already. He had been a bastard from... Read more
I watched the 2003 favela gangster film City of God last night, and I have little to add to Victor Morton’s insightful review: …[T]he hyper-caffeinated style in CITY OF GOD is just breathtaking and entertaining as all get-go — the orange-clay look of the 50s segment, a bravura one-shot dissolve through the history of a single room in the favela over decades, the repeated freeze-frames, a 360-degree stop-motion shot, the great sequence of Benny’s “leaving the life” party. And it’s... Read more
don’t miss the endnote: TO M.N. Katkov [First half of September], 1865, Wiesbaden K[ind] S[ir] M[ikhail] N[ikiforovich] May I hope to have my story published in your magazine, R[ussian] M[essenger]? I have been working on it for 2 months now here in Wiesbaden, and it is nearing completion. It will contain between five and six printer’s sheets. I still have a couple of weeks’ work left on it, or perhaps a bit more. In any case, I can promise definitely... Read more
from the Deseret News: …Stephanie and her kids were on the edge of an incarceration wave that pulled in thousands of parents and hundreds of thousands of children at the end of the last century. In 1991 there were 936,500 minor children with a parent in state or federal prison. By the end of 1999, there were 1,498,800, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics — more than a 50 percent leap in less than a decade. … But even... Read more
reporting live from 1984! What everybody forgets about the Smiths is how much fun they were. And not just fun: The band careened through the ’80s putting out four studio albums which were joyful, sexy, funny, self-deprecating, silly, and even sometimes compulsively danceable. The myth of Morrissey and his mopey muse has some truth to it—and he made the jokes first, in song titles like “Miserable Lie,” “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Pretty Girls Make Graves” and the rest—but the... Read more
at AmCon: When we talk about the TV renaissance, we should talk about “Veronica Mars.” The 2004 “high school noir” show’s extraordinary first season mixed weekly casefiles with a season-long arc–two arcs, actually. Veronica starts the show as a suddenly bereft and embittered California teen: Her best friend has been murdered, her father lost his sheriff’s job when he fingered a local corporate bigwig for the crime, she lost all her friends in the aftermath, and when she tried to... Read more
There were vast swathes of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that. Read more
No words: …In 2009, I and my colleagues at Juvenile Law Center were asked to take on the case of 15-year-old T. D., who was placed in solitary confinement for 178 days while committed to the New Jersey juvenile justice system. He was initially placed in solitary out of concern for his mental health. Yes — ironic, using solitary confinement to “help” a child with mental health and emotional issues. Troy spent the majority of this seven month period locked... Read more
Last night I saw Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Pulitzer-winning Water by the Spoonful at Studio Theatre. It uses dissonant jazz as a metaphor for the disjunctions and collisions in our own lives, asking whether these discordant notes will ever resolve into harmony. The show tells two parallel stories: A young vet with PTSD fights with his cousin about how to mourn his dying adoptive mother, and members of an online support group for “crackheads” (their term, which is important, see below)... Read more
with some excellent points: …Get to know people who live a celibate vocation Finding active models of a celibate life worth living is hard. I spent time hanging out at monasteries and reading memoirs of people who remained single throughout their entire life. One of the most helpful books for me is My Song is Of Mercy by Fr. Matthew Kelty because Fr. Matthew is living out a celibate vocation as a gay man. Fr. Matthew’s sermons include occasional examples... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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