The Absolute Emptiness of Slogans

The two most powerful political slogans of our era are “Make America Great Again”, and “Black Lives Matter.” Both of them, once uttered, seemed to invite immediate, obvious, simple-minded rejoinders. “America is already great,” say Trump’s opponents. “All Lives Matter,” say those who are made uncomfortable by the hint of exclusion in BLM. But for the initiated, the rejoinders almost prove the necessity of repeating the slogan.

In other words, the genius of both phrases is that they are self-authenticating.

When pundits and think-tankers shout back “America is already great,” they confirm that they were servants for the winners of the last 30 years of American politics. Trump’s signature mantra is aimed directly at the places that have lost their manufacturing jobs to Mexico or China, the places that suddenly have a major drug problem or an abundance of unemployed middle-aged men, the places where life expectancy is going down and confidence in the next generation doing better than the last is at an all-time low.

The people shouting “All Lives Matter” energize anti-racist activists, to whom they seem obtuse. For most of its adherents, “Black Lives Matter” isn’t meant as a slur or slight on non-blacks. It is a cry for attention to problems that uniquely afflict black lives in America. It is a demand for addressing those problems specifically. It is a call for dignity. The black experience in America is unique to blacks. That matters, or at least it should. The very discomfort with acknowledging that of course black lives matter is evidence that the assertion has to be repeated over and over again until people get it.

There’s just one problem with all of this: MAGA and BLM turn out to be entirely empty slogans on close inspection. Or at least, any substance they might have represented has been emptied out by the pre-existing and elite interests that commandeered them.

What is the MAGA agenda? There isn’t much of one. There’s been no real plan for the opioid crisis or the revival of declining regions, no credible promise of great new infrastructure projects. Beyond a few easily reversed executive orders Trump has done nothing to make our immigration system sensible or serve the interests of lower-wage Americans. There’s been a lot of empty gesturing meant to look like substantive action — a phony trade war with China that ended in Trump begging for a few extra soybean purchases from swing states, a few hundred miles of border fencing funded out of the Pentagon’s coffers, rather than Mexico’s. Insofar as Trump has an agenda of any substance, it is a pre-existing one that he didn’t invent or modify: A massive tax cut for corporations paired with the partial elimination of a tax break for affluent blue-staters and the confirmation of lots of judges approved by the conservative legal establishment.

What is the Black Lives Matter agenda? The official BLM organization, the one that’s been in receipt of millions of dollars from the titans of global capitalism, has a statement of belief. The statement begins with racism and policing issues, which do rank in almost every survey as vitally important if not the most important issues among black voters. But what comes next? Do a search for words like “education” or “housing.” Nothing. Do a search for the most important institution in black life, the church. Nothing. A significant majority of blacks list “health-care” as one of the major issues that determines their vote. It’s not even referenced.

Instead, what do you find? The vapid cultural politics of academia talking to itself in the mirror. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” come ahead of the first mention of economics. “Cisgender privilege” is denounced. The only life-shaping institution mentioned is the “nuclear family,” which BLM vows to “disrupt.” (As if the nuclear family hadn’t already been disrupted in black lives! 65 percent of black children live in a single-parent home.) This is a manifesto for grad students and radical journalists.

by Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review via Yahoo News |  Read more:

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Long nights
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Kenny Vaughn

"Grosse Fatigue" Tells the Story of Life on Earth

The French artist Camille Henrot’s thirteen-minute video-art masterpiece, “Grosse Fatigue” (“Major Exhaustion,” or, as a 1994 comedy translated the phrase, “Dead Tired”), is a Wunderkammer of and for the Internet era. Made in 2013, the piece is now streaming on YouTube until July 16th as part of an online exhibition called “Video Lives,” from the Museum of Modern Art. (Because video art is so rarely displayed in full online, it is something of a rare item in its own right.) “Grosse Fatigue” emerges from and dissects the endless archives we’ve created online. It’s somewhere between a video essay (that arcane format) and a supercut, collaging found archival clips, Henrot’s own footage, meme gifs, and documentary shots from inside the Smithsonian, where Henrot developed the piece during a residency.

“Grosse Fatigue” depicts, more or less, the evolution of life on Earth, mashing up creation myths and scientific theories, art, poetry, and the human body, with a conspicuous lack of boundaries that recalls the seventeenth century, when all of those categories were thought to have more in common. The video takes place on a computer screen: on a familiar Mac desktop, with a hard drive labelled “HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE,” a cursor opens a file titled “GROSSE_FATIGUE_.” Offscreen, the artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh recites an epic poem written by Henrot and the poet Jacob Bromberg, and a propulsive beat composed by Joakim Bouaziz plays in the background. File-browser frames pop up and close, nesting in one another, piling up. It’s a digital data binge in which resonance matters more than fact or logic. (...)

Henrot’s work has moved between drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, often collaging different media and subject matters together. Her themes are sprawling: hope, archives, classical myth, the way the detritus of the mind spills out into the world of objects. The format of “Grosse Fatigue” is particularly successful at illuminating the crush of information we face in the twenty-first century, daunting and confusing but also magical, infinitely recombinable. The seventeenth-century Wunderkammer gained its value because of a scarcity of knowledge, which is now obsolete—we can Google anything and see what it looks like. Henrot, working in a period of overwhelming accessibility, restores a sense of wonder and discovery, the epiphany of holding a mysterious specimen in your hands.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

US Universities Are Charging Full Fees For 'Virtual' Class This Fall. This Is Absurd

Colleges and universities are in an unprecedented bind. Coronavirus continues to rage in many parts of America, making the sort of communal gatherings that are hallmarks of collegiate life outright dangerous. Lecture halls, libraries, football games and dorm-room parties can all be superspreader events.

Some educational institutions have already declared that almost the entire academic year will occur remotely, while others are forging on with in-person learning. Two of the schools I teach at, NYU and St Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, are attempting the latter, which will carry its own risks, depending on how New York City progresses in its continuing battle to keep infection rates low.

For schools that have decided against most in-person instruction, the caution exercised is understandable. The University of California system, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Rutgers have all declared that the bulk of their course offerings will be online. But about 60% of schools nationwide are still planning an in-person start to the year.

What they all aren’t doing is reducing tuition, even though a significant portion of the value these educational institutions provide is now lost indefinitely. Only Princeton has offered a 10% price cut. Harvard, with its $40bn endowment, is still charging full tuition. So are Rutgers and the University of California schools, both public universities.

Though they charge less than private institutions, Rutgers or a University of California school aren’t cheap. In-state students at California public universities still pay about $14,000 a year to attend. At Rutgers, in New Jersey, in-state students pay a little more than $12,000. (At both schools, out-of-state tuition is far higher, more than $40,000 and $30,000 respectively.)

Remote learning, no matter how well-intentioned, is a diluted product, and students deserve a tuition reduction for sitting at home and staring at a laptop screen. As someone who taught remotely this past semester, I strained to provide a comparable experience to what students were used to. Ultimately I could not. Professors cannot connect with students in the same way. And the ancillary benefits of college – making friends, networking with peers, joining clubs, playing intramural sports – are all lost.

There is an argument that students, especially at prestige schools, are still getting the value of a degree and therefore should pay the full freight. Isn’t the diploma ultimately what matters? But that’s not how colleges and universities pitch themselves to unsuspecting freshmen.

College life is not merely about scoring a dream job right after graduation. It’s supposed to be an experience. Behold our manicured lawns, our successful basketball team, our state-of-the-art fitness center, the newly revamped computer lab – and pay dearly for them. Part of the tradeoff of taking on crippling debt is supposed to be the creation of unforgettable memories, those four life-changing years you’ll never have again. Remote learning promises none of that.

by Ross Barkan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Charles Krupa/AP
[ed. The same could be said about hospitals and telemedicine. Where's the price cut for reduced services?]

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Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?

“In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.” I am not in a strange room, but my familiar room is in a strange world, and this passage from a novel by William Faulkner haunts me.

Having lived abroad for all of my adult life, I have been thinking about the effects of distance for years. My family, several friends and I live on different continents, and most of the time we meet online, and in person only in the summer. So whenever we see each other in the flesh, we take in quietly the subtle differences between who we are and the versions of each other we’ve lived with in our heads, a little abstract for lack of contact: a tighter or more relaxed smile, a few more white hairs, children who look a little more grown-up, a pale complexion that might suggest illness, a deeper quality to someone’s silence, an averted gaze when a particular topic is mentioned… All point to the thick accumulation of days, of every day we have not been together.

Now I have to pretend that my friends here, my colleagues and students also live abroad, and that my neighbors are glass-shielded in an intangible dimension. It feels odd to live in exile from almost everybody, as if we had each been sucked through a portal to a remote island, or a distant planet.

When you empty yourself for sleep, at the end of a day populated so sparsely by actual persons, but overflowing with abstracted silhouettes—of people who have lost their jobs or who couldn’t bid a final farewell to their loved ones, of friends who wave from a screen and give you news you can’t do much about, of family far away who will remain so far in this long present—what are you?

There is hardly a reason, and often no time, to think about our everyday life when we are in it. The rituals we engage in without thinking, the distracted habits of thought; they are unfamiliar through excess of familiarity, like the shape of our shoes molded onto our feet, or the intimate space of the night table where we reach without looking.

There is something of that taken-for-granted involvement with the world in the sphere of social relations too: not only the family and friends we usually choose to hang out with, or the colleagues we work with, but all those people we might run into on a daily basis in the improvised sociability of ordinary life—people we see only from the corner of the eye, or even not at all, but whose presence gives us a sense of life unfolding.

Such presence is felt in the electrifying energy of a crowd that dissolves you—in a stadium where hundreds or thousands of gazes are tethered to a basketball, or in a concert hall, tuned with hundreds of people to the rhythm of a performance. I both know and ignore what I’m missing these days. I suspect my unease has something to do with not being able to interact with my students in person. The energy they give me in the classroom is hard to retrieve from pixelated smiles, the end of each session slightly disconcerting, given everyone’s abrupt disappearance at the push of a button.

I miss the carefree exuberance of the playgrounds where I take my daughter to play alongside other children, and the cozy cinema in my neighborhood where I used to go every now and then just to watch a movie in the quiet company of other people. It’s as if all these venues were hosting a version of John Cage’s 4’33”, rendered meaningless by the lack of closure.

A few years ago I finished working on a book called The Art of Distances, which became my baseline for trying to understand the meaning of this episode we’re all writing together, through our collective experiment in social distancing. What value can one ascribe to distance? What insights do we gain by staying away from others, and at such close quarters with ourselves?

by Corina Stan, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Evidence Found of Epic Prehistoric Pacific Voyages

New evidence has been found for epic prehistoric voyages between the Americas and eastern Polynesia.

DNA analysis suggests there was mixing between Native Americans and Polynesians around AD 1200.

The extent of potential contacts between the regions has been a hotly contested area for decades.

In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a journey by raft from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate the voyage was possible.

Until now, proponents of Native American and Polynesian interaction reasoned that some common cultural elements, such as a similar word used for a common crop, hinted that the two populations had mingled before Europeans settled in South America.

Opponents pointed to studies with differing conclusions and the fact that the two groups were separated by thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

Alexander Ioannidis from Stanford University in California and his international colleagues analysed genetic data from more than 800 living indigenous inhabitants of coastal South America and French Polynesia.

They were looking for snippets of DNA that are characteristic of each population and for segments that are "identical by descent" - meaning they are inherited from the same ancestor many generations ago.

"We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands," said Mr Ioannidis.

"It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event."

In other words, Polynesians and Native Americans met at one point in history, and during that time children with both Native American and Polynesian ancestry were born.

Statistical analyses confirmed the event occurred around AD 1200, at about the time Pacific islands were originally being settled by Polynesians.

Asked who he thought made contact first, Mr Ioannidis ventured that it may have been Polynesian navigators reaching South America.

"Because the timing is exactly at the time that the Polynesians were embarking on their longest voyages of discovery and soon after they discovered Easter Island, which is extremely remote, and also later settling New Zealand and Hawaii, they had no idea there was going to be a continent eventually and they were going to run out of islands, so I think they probably did find a continent," he said.

by BBC |  Read more:

Image: Thor Heyerdahl uncredited

Opioid Overdoses Are Skyrocketing

In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave.

The epidemic that hit the Appalachian state harder than any other in the US finally looked to be in retreat. Now it’s advancing again. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.

Covid-19 has claimed 93 lives in West Virginia over the past three months. That is only a fraction of those killed by drug overdoses, which caused nearly 1,000 deaths in the state in 2018 alone, mostly from opioids but also methamphetamine (also known as meth).

That year was better than the one before as the Appalachian state appeared to turn the tide on an epidemic that has ravaged the region for two decades, destroying lives, tearing apart families and dragging down local economies.

Now coronavirus looks to be undoing the advances made against a drug epidemic that has claimed close to 600,000 lives in the US over the past two decades. Worse, it is also laying the ground for a long-term resurgence of addiction by exacerbating many of the conditions, including unemployment, low incomes and isolation, that contributed to the rise of the opioid epidemic and “deaths of despair”.

“The number of opioid overdoses is skyrocketing and I don’t think it will be easily turned back,” said Dr Mike Brumage, former director of the West Virginia office of drug control policy.

“Once the tsunami of Covid-19 finally recedes, we’re going to be left with the social conditions that enabled the opioid crisis to emerge in the first place, and those are not going to go away.” (...)

The American Medical Association said it was “greatly concerned” at reported increases in opioid overdoses in more than 30 states although it will be months before hard data is available.

Public health officials from Kentucky to Florida, Texas and Colorado have recorded surges in opioid deaths as the economic and social anxieties created by the Covid-19 pandemic prove fertile ground for addiction. In addition, Brumage said significant numbers of people have fallen out of treatment programmes as support networks have been yanked away by social distancing orders.

“I’m a firm adherent to the idea that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection. Clearly, what we have lost with the pandemic is a loss of connection,” he said.

by Chris McGreal, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image:Uncredited/AP

[ed. And a climate crisis that's not going away, either. See also: Life after opioids: 'We have not served our patients well' (Guardian); and ‘Cries for help’: Drug overdoses are soaring during the coronavirus pandemic (Washington Post).]

This fish ladder on the Sorne in the Pichoux Gorge, Delémont, Switzerland is a prefabricated fish pass with 24 tanks and a height of 12.5 feet/3.80 m, & was built in 2008 to allow fish to migrate across elevations between the lakes & rivers. Fish swim up the gradual level between pools.

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Is Everyone Depressed?

Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says. Leiferman’s team recently found that people in Colorado have, during the pandemic, been nine times more likely to report poor mental health than usual. About 23 percent of Coloradans have symptoms of clinical depression.

As a rough average, during pre-pandemic life, 5 to 7 percent of people met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression. Now, depending how you define the condition, orders of magnitude more people do. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, extrapolates from a recent Lancet study in China to estimate that about 50 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing depressive symptoms. “We are witnessing the mental-health implications of massive disease and death,” he says. This has the effect of altering the social norm by which depression and other conditions are defined. Essentially, this throws off the whole definitional rubric.

Feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and hopelessness are now so common as to verge on being considered normal. But what we are seeing is far less likely an actual increase in a disease of the brain than a series of circumstances that is drawing out a similar neurochemical mix. This poses a diagnostic conundrum. Millions of people exhibiting signs of depression now have to discern ennui from temporary grieving from a medical condition. Those at home Googling symptoms need to know when to seek medical care, and when it’s safe to simply try baking more bread. Clinicians, meanwhile, need to decide how best to treat people with new or worsening symptoms: to diagnose millions of people with depression, or to more aggressively treat the social circumstances at the core of so much suffering.

Clearly articulating the meaning of medical depression is an existential challenge for the mental-health profession, and for a country that does not ensure its people health care. If we fail, the second wave of death from this pandemic will not be directly caused by the virus. It will take the people who suffered mentally from its reverberations.

Like COVID-19, depression takes erratic courses. Some predictable patterns exist, but no two cases are exactly alike. Depression can percolate for long periods then quickly become severe. Some people will barely notice it, and others will be tested in the extreme.

Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, groups people based on four basic ways they’re responding to the current crisis. Two are straightforward. In the first are people who are drawing on huge stockpiles of resilience and truly doing okay. When you ask how they feel and they say “eh, fine,” they actually mean it. In the second, at the opposite end of things, are people who already have a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder or a persistent version known as dysthymia. Right now, their symptoms are at high risk of escalating. “They develop what some clinicians call ‘double depression,’ in which the underlying disorder coexists with a new layer of fear and sorrow,” Solomon says. Such people may need higher levels of medical care than usual, and may even need to be hospitalized.

The remaining two groups constitute more of a gray area. One group consists of the millions of people now experiencing depressive symptoms in a real way, but who nonetheless will return to their baseline eventually, as long as their symptoms are addressed. People in this group are in urgent need of basic interventions that help create routine and structure. Those might involve regularizing sleep and food, minimizing alcohol and other substances, exercising, avoiding obsessions with the news, and cutting back on other aimless habits that might be easier to moderate in normal times.

The fourth group encompasses people who are starting to develop clinical depression. More than simply a wellness regimen or a Zoom with friends, they need some type of formal medical intervention. They may have seemed fine and had adequate resilience in normal times, to deal with normal difficulties, but they’ve always had a propensity to develop overt depression. Solomon describes this group as “hanging on the precipice of what could be considered pathologic.” It can be especially precarious because people in this state—what some researchers refer to as “subclinical depression”—have not dealt with depression before, and may not have the capacity or resources to proactively seek treatment. (...)

Today, depression—the clinical condition, otherwise known as major depressive disorder—is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mood disorder.* To receive the diagnosis, a person must have five or more symptoms such as the following, nearly every day during a two-week period: fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, reduced physical movement, indecisiveness or impaired concentration, a decreased or increased appetite, and a greatly diminished interest or pleasure in regular activities.

Experts are trained to identify exactly how much “impaired concentration” or “loss of energy” is enough to qualify for a diagnosis, and the criteria are intentionally flexible enough to factor in patients’ individual circumstances. But as the pandemic has made clear, the DSM-5 and medical model as a whole don’t provide the richness of language to account for all the nuanced ways people might look or feel depressed, even when they don’t need medical intervention. Well-meaning attempts to standardize the diagnostic process have created a false binary wherein you are a person with depression, or you are not.

Outside of medicine, depression has been most cogently defined through metaphor. As Sylvia Plath wrote: “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” David Foster Wallace described depression as feeling that “every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick.” Even some clinical models reach for alternative ways of articulating despair beyond the conventional medical model. James Hollis, a psychodynamic analyst and the author of Living Between Worlds: Finding Resilience in Changing Times, says that depression is sometimes the result of “intrapsychic tension,” a conflict between two areas of our psyche, or identity. The tension is created, Hollis observes, “when we’re forced to try to make acquaintances with ourselves in new ways.”

by James Hamblin, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Namrata Gosavi
[ed. See also: This Is Not a Normal Mental-Health Disaster (Atlantic).]

Tokyo, Japan, 1913 - 1915 (Colorized)

[ed. See also: Japan's devastating rains move north as millions told to evacuate (Guardian).]

Carl Reiner's Life Should Remind Us: If You Like Laughing, Thank FDR and The New Deal

Has Stephen Colbert ever made you laugh? Or Jordan Peele? Or Steve Carell? Or Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Poehler, Cecily Strong, Chris Redd, Aidy Bryant, Jason Sudeikis, Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Adam McKay, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Elaine May, or Mike Nichols? Unless you’re way off the normal human spectrum, the answer is yes.

But here’s something few comedy fans — including some comedians themselves — realize: An incredible amount of the development of American comedy, including the training and platforms that helped start the careers of every comedian above, can be traced directly back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided government support for the arts at a level never to be repeated.

This forgotten history surfaced briefly when Carl Reiner died Monday night at age 98. By this point, Reiner is probably best known to normal people as the father of film director Rob Reiner (“The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “This Is Spinal Tap”). But in the comedy world, Reiner is revered as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He was a writer and performer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s; he created “The Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s; he recorded the “2000 Year Old Man” records with Mel Brooks; he directed four of Steve Martin’s early movies, starting with “The Jerk”; and much more.

In Reiner’s memoir “My Anecdotal Life,” he wrote that “I owe my show business career to two people: Charlie Reiner” — his brother — “and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

When Carl Reiner was 17 in 1939, he was working as a machinist’s helper, bringing sewing machines to hat factories. Then Reiner’s brother saw a small ad in the New York Daily News about free acting lessons being offered in lower Manhattan by the Works Progress Administration. Reiner had never contemplated acting before in his life, but his brother insisted, so he went.

The WPA had been established several years prior to carry out public works projects during the Great Depression, with workers put directly on the government payroll, keeping the struggling economy afloat while also expanding the infrastructure of the U.S. Its initial outlays were huge — the gross domestic product equivalent of about $1.3 trillion today. The WPA paved roads, built bridges, and constructed Camp David and the Tennessee Valley Authority. But it went beyond these physical public works to enhance America’s human infrastructure via Federal Project Number One, which employed writers, musicians, and actors. The Federal Theatre Project, part of Federal Project Number One, funded live performances and acting classes — including the ones Carl Reiner attended.

“All the good things that have happened to me in my life I can trace to that two-inch newspaper item my brother handed to me,” Reiner explained. “Had Charlie not brought it to my attention, I might very well be writing anecdotes about my life as a machinist or, more likely, not be writing anything about anything.”

But Reiner’s life was just one small aspect of the WPA’s impact. A few years earlier in Chicago, a sociologist named Neva Boyd had begun working with immigrant children by teaching them dance, movement, and improvisational games. She soon brought this work to Hull House, a progressive “settlement house” — a central place where anyone regardless of age, class, or culture could go to learn, share, engage with art, express themselves, and grow.

Boyd viewed creativity and playfulness as essential for a democratic society. “Social living cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies — domination, hate, prejudice, greed and dishonesty,” she wrote in a famous essay. “Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination.”

Boyd worked for the WPA during the Great Depression and recommended one of her disciples named Viola Spolin for a job as drama supervisor for the WPA’s local recreational projects. Spolin expanded on Boyd’s work, reaching poor children and adults (including recent immigrants who weren’t fluent in English) with playful stage exercises. One innovation of Spolin’s games was performers generating improvised scenes based on suggestions from the audience.

For Boyd and Spolin, the spirit of play was for all people, not just a tiny “creative” minority. “Everyone can act,” Spolin said. “Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stage-worthy. We learn through experience and experiencing. … ‘Talent’ or ‘lack of talent’ has little to do with it.” Thanks to the funding from the WPA, Spolin was able to create a formal body of “Theater Games” that lay the groundwork for the improv comedy canon to this day.

by Bob Harris, Jon Schwarz, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Bob Riha Jr/Getty Images via

Mike Ryczek
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Bountygate and Afghanistan

Bountygate: Scapegoating Systemic Military Failure in Afghanistan (Consortium News)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening (The Atlantic)

Image: Shutterstock/NIH/The Atlantic

in time of daffodils (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)
in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me

~ e. e. cummings

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Eddie Vedder

[ed. Original by Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam). See also: Harold and Maude]