0 What We're Reading Today (7-17-14)

Jameelah has been harassing me everyday to give her articles to read. Jameelah, here is the dump. This should be like 20+ articles for  you and the rest of The Horde to consume. Happy reading and happier summers to everyone.

With Friends Like These... On the Military Occupation of Chicago - Prison Culture

What We Talk About When We Talk About Violence in Chicago - NPR
Gene Demby

Kafka's Joke Book - McSweeney's
John McNamee

Which Supreme Court Justices Vote Together Most and Least Often - NY Times
Jeremy Bowers, Adam Liptak, Derek Willis

The Democrats Are Finally Turning Away from Israel - Foreign Policy
Michael A. Cohen

Democracy, Freedom, and Apple Pie Aren't a Foreign Policy - Foreign Policy
Stephen M. Walt

Newspapers That Aren't Dying - The Atlantic
Devjyot Ghoshal

The Survivor: How Eric Holder outlasted his (many) critics - Politico
Glenn Thrush

Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing - The Atlantic
Meredith Broussard

Lionel Messi Is Impossible - FiveThirtyEight
Benjamin Morris

Behind Harry Reid's war against the Koch Brothers - Politico
Kenneth P. Vogel

The World Cup of Dirty Dreams: Inside Brazil's Most Infamous Brothel - Rolling Stone
Amos Barshad

Brazil's 'Quilombo' Movement May Be The World's Largest Slavery Reparations Program - Huffington Post
Roque Planas

Deadly Embrace - London Review of Books
Jacqueline Rose

Florida Deja Voodoo - Slate
Ron Klain

Talking Openly About Obama and Race - New Yorker
Jelani Cobb

Thanks to Urbanization, Tomorrow's Megalopolises Will Be in Africa and Asia - Foreign Policy
Reid Standish

Black Chicago Divided - In These Times
Salim Muwakkil

Blood in the Streets: A Conversation About Gun Violence in Chicago - Gawker
Jason Parham

Love in the Time of Racism - Ada New Media
Darnell Moore and Monica J. Casper

Always on the Side of the Egg - Haaretz
Haruki Murakami

Why One of the Biggest LGBT Orgs Has Stopped Supporting ENDA - Advocate
Rea Carey

Five Young Palestinians on What It's Like to Live and Die in Gaza - The Daily Beast
Dean Obeidallah

The Hip-Hop Fellow Outtakes: Young Guru on the Rise of Kanye West - NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Mark Anthony Neal

Appeals Court upholds affirmative action in Fisher v. Texas - Politico
Allie Grasgreen

Pirates, the Printing Press, and Global Democracy - Huffington Post
Don Kraus and Logan Cotton

UN to Confront United States on Persistent Racial Discrimination - ACLU
Chandra Bhatnagar

Twitterball - Tech Crunch
Matthew Panzarino

Visualizing a Day in the Life of a New York City Cab - FiveThirtyEight
Chadwick Matlin

Also, this World Cup video is here to give  you all the nostalgia.

0 What We're Reading Today (6-24-14)

Apologies, again, for the lack of content coming through on Snakes. I'm working in DC this summer and I have been writing on two other blogs as well. One with my internship at GlobalSolutions.org and the other is a project out of TFA Houston called, "Textual Healing." It was already tough to keep Snakes updated and my writing has been pulled in multiple directions. The positive, though, means I have been reading plenty.

I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns currently. I finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before leaving Houston for Chicago. I'm hopeful that I will be traveling more this summer -- perhaps to Boston, Philadelphia, and/or New York. That will give me some more time to dig into Wilkerson's text and perhaps start a new one.

That said, here is what I have been reading the past few days.

Who Gets to Graduate? - New York Times
Paul Tough

A Brazilian Street Artists has Created the First Viral Image from the World Cup - Slate
Jeremy Stahl

How the most ideologically polarized Americans live their lives - Pew
Drew Desilver

Which party is more to blame for political polarization? - Pew
Carroll Doherty

Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop's Newest Old-School Star - New York Times
Lizzy Goodman

Q&A: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Reparations, Ignorant Journalism, and Whether He Talks to President Obama - The New Republic
Isaac Chotiner

When Latinos Don't Look at Themselves: Enabling Racialized Language on Spanish-Language US TV - Latino Rebels
Julio Varela

Chart of the Week: The World Cup of (almost) Anything - Pew
Drew Desilver

Inside the Battle for Fair Housing in 1960s Chicago - The Atlantic
Kasia Cieplak-Meyer von Baldegg; Sam Price-Waldman; Paul Rosenfeld

Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism - Nuclear Unicorn
Katherine Cross

The Racism Beat - Medium
Cord Jefferson

A game of two halves - Economist

The Lost Innovation History of the Doritos Tacos Locos - The Atlantic
Alexis C. Madrigal

The Case for Reparations: A Narrative Bibliography - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Radical Practicality of Reparations - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Case for American History - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Autopsy - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

13 Astounding Numbers About This Year's World Cup - Mother Jones
AJ Vicens and Ian Gordon

Jed Rakoff and the Lonely Fight for Wall Street Justice - The Nation
Sasha Abramsky

The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism - Pacific Standard
Lauren Kascak & Sayantani Dasgupta

New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United States - Washington Post
Radley Balko

How We Play the Game - New York Times

No Country for Old Pervs: The Fall of the Houses of Terry Richardson and Dov Charney - Grantland
Molly Lambert

1 The Warmth of Other Suns - Florida and the Lynching of Claude Neal

This summer I'm reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  The book was cited heavily by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his discussion (read: trouncing) of Jonathan Chait and I am hopeful that I will expand my own cultural and historical awareness through reading it.  

For those who haven't read it, Wilkerson follows three different individuals as they discuss their own migrations from the South to the North. She uses them to illustrate the context in which sharecropping, Jim Crow, housing segregation, and the many other maladies of the hundred years of the Great Migration.  At times, this has been slightly frustrating but the effect, as I continue to read, has only enhanced my enjoyment. I keep circling quotations in this book and I think that this summer, I will be copying many of them down here.

To the extent that you would like, please read on.  And, of course, I encourage you to purchase the book.

Now, with a new century approaching, blacks in the South, accustomed to the liberties established after the [Civil War], were hurled back in time, as if the preceding three decades, limited though they may have been, had never happened. One by one, each license or freedom accorded them was stripped away. The world got smaller, narrower, more confined with each new court ruling and ordinance.
Not unlike European Jews who watched the world close in on them slowly, perhaps barely perceptibly, at the start of Nazism, colored people in the South would first react in denial and disbelief to the rising hysteria, then, helpless to stop it, attempt a belated resistance, not knowing and not able to imagine how far the supremacists would go. The outcomes for both groups were widely divergent, one suffering unspeakable loss and genocide, the other enduring nearly a century of apartheid, pogroms, and mob executions. But the hatreds and fears that fed both assaults were not dissimilar and relied on arousing the passions of the indifferent to mount so complete an attack.
The South began acting in outright defiance to the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.
Politicians began riding these anti-black sentiments all the way to governors' mansions throughout the South and to seats in the US Senate.
"If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," James K. Vardaman, the white supremacy candidate in the 1903 Mississippi governor's race, declared. He saw no reason for blacks to go to school. "The only effect of Negro education," he said, "is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook."
Mississippi voted Vardaman into the governor's office and later sent him to the US Senate."
- Pg. 38

Lake County and the rest of central Florida were far from the lights of Miami and the palm-tree version of paradise that tourists came for. This was the Florida that had entered the Union as a slave state, where a Florida slaveholder could report without apology, in 1839, that he worked his slaves "in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o'clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning." Florida went farther than some other slave states in the creativity of its repression: Slaves could not gather together to pray. They couldn't leave their plantations, even for a walk, without written permission from their owner. If they were accused of wrongdoing, "their hands were burned with a heated iron, their ears nailed to posts," or their backs stripped raw with seventy-five lashes from a buckskin whip. The few free blacks in the state had to register with the nearest probate court or could be automatically enslaved by any white person who stepped forward to claim possession.
As the country neared the point of collapse over the issue of a state's right to slavery, Florida in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War. Florida broke away on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy's vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." This new government, Stephens declared, "is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
- Pg. 59

That October (1934), a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy's family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius or Marianna.
The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal's whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.
It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday. Neal's chief abductors, a self-described "committee of six," an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M., when most everyone would be off work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.
Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly--people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states--that the committee of six, fearing a riot, tok Neal to the woods by the Chipola river to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution.
There, his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts "and say he liked it," a witness said.
"One man threw up at the sight," wrote the historian James R. McGovern.
Around Neal's neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again.
"Every now an then somebody would cut off a finger or toe," the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.
"It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable torture for such a long period," wrote the white undercover investigator retained by the NAACP.
The crowd waiting in town never got to see Neal die. The committee of six decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives. The dead girl's father was angry that Neal was killed before he could get to him. "They done me wrong about the killing," the father said. "They promised me they would bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That's what I wanted."

The committee hanged the body "from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn." People reportedly displayed Neal's fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, a mob of as many as two thousand people demanded that it be rehanged. When the sheriff refused to return it to the tree, the mob attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, attacking any colored person they ran into. Well-to-do whites hid their maids or sent cars to bring their workers to safety. "We needed these people," said a white man who sat on his porch protecting his interests with a loaded Winchester. Florida Governor David Sholtz had to call in the National Guard to quell the mob.
Across the country, thousands of outraged Americans wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanding a federal investigation. The NAACP compiled a sixteen-page report and more files on the Neal case than any other lynching in American history. But Neal had the additional misfortune of having been lynched just before the 1934 national midterm elections, which were being seen as a referendum on the New Deal itself. Roosevelt chose not to risk alienating the South with a Democratic majority in Congress at stake. He did not intervene in the case. No one was ever charged in Neal's death or spent a day in jail for it. The Jackson County grand jury, in the common language of such inquests, reported that the execution had occurred "at the hands of persons unknown to us."
Soon afterward, it was learned that Neal and the dead girl, who had known each other all their lives, had been lovers and that people in her family who discovered the liaison may have been involved in her death for the shame it had brought to the family. Indeed, the summer after Neal was lynched, the girl's father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his niece because he suspected that that side of the family had had a hand in his daughter's death.
In sentencing the father to five years in prison for attacking the relative, the judge said, "I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don't believe you have any too many brains."
The father replied, "Yes, judge. I am plumb crazy."
Thereafter, Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South. Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the Florida governor's special investigator, Jefferson Elliot, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it "never had a negro live long enough to go to trial."
- Pg. 60

0 The Usual Suspects: A Tale of Two Marathons; of Two Terrorisms

** This is a post written by my very good friend, Suyu.  Suyu is one of my closest friends at Tufts and, as of Monday, has run the Boston Marathon twice.  He shared his thoughts on Facebook and gave me permission to post this Facebook note that he wrote for us here at Snakes on McCain.  Props to you, Suyu. **

_______________________________________

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

My name is Suyu Zhang, and I am a senior at Tufts University.  I was meters from the first blast of the bomb that went off on April 15^th 2013 and one of the last runners to have crossed the finish line. This is my account of the 117^th Boston Marathon.

I have participated in two Boston Marathons; as a freshman and a foreigner in 2010, and then as a senior and an American in 2013. Both times, I woke up on the morning of the marathon not knowing that I would be running in the race. Both times I have walked away from the Boston Marathon with a heavy heart.

The spring of my freshman year, I was a foreign student studying in the United States. The morning of the Boston Marathon, I was woken up early by my pledge educator to go and observe the race after an especially heavy night of celebration at the fraternity. My pledge brothers brought backpacks filled with homework and textbooks to balance the day between catching up on work and cheering on our friends. On a whim, we decided to join the race. Foolishly, I decided to help carry a friend’s backpack full of textbooks after the 10-mile mark. Foolishly but proudly, I carried that weight and the weight of my hangover through the rolling hills of suburban and urban Boston. While the experience was painful, it was also unforgettable. The energy, sportsmanship, and the camaraderie of the race and especially that of the Greater Boston communities was unbelievable. There was not a single moment during the race that I felt alone, weak, or unsafe. While I had been in the Greater Boston area for close to a year at that point, I’d never known or appreciated its character, its community. For the first time I saw and felt a glimpse of this city’s beauty. I finished the marathon in 5 hours, heavy legged, and exhausted. Aside from the physical pain, however, I felt proud, my heart heavy but filled with joy and confidence. I was beginning to love Boston.

In 2013, I was a mere 20 meters from the first blast of the bomb that went off on April 15^th. I woke up early in the morning as an American citizen (having attained citizenship in 2011).  I felt an undeniable urge to run, to see the rolling hills of Hopkinton and to hear the cheering crowds in Wellesley, and to conquer Heartbreak Hill in Newton. I wanted to see this city and community, which I have grown to appreciate and love, one last time before the uncertainty of graduation. I hitched a ride with a close friend who was also planning to run that day. On a whim, once again, I had decided to run the Boston Marathon.

Around 2:50 p.m., just after I had crossed the finish line and exchanged words of excitement with a friend over the phone, I heard a deafening blast, deep into the ground. Confused and surprised, I turned around. It had sounded like a cannon blast and although my memory from 4 years ago was hazy, I was certain that this was not part of the planned celebration. Then I saw smoke, slowly but menacingly rising from the Fairmount Copley Plaza Hotel; the flags of different countries blowing in the complete opposite direction of the wind.  Stunned and silent my fellow runners and I stood still. A race official grabbed me by the shirt and yelled,  “Go!” Before I had time to react, a second but distant boom echoed across the finish line. Boston, media would later confirm, was struck by terrorism and the rest is history.

I left the race that day with a heavy heart, just as I had four years ago. This time not filled with pride or joy, but with fear. Fear for the lives and safety of my friends. Fear for the pain and suffering of beloved college town, my community. But also, fear that I would never run through Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, Newton, Brookline or Boston again. Fear that I would be lost. Fear that Boston will grow to reject me.

I do not mean to take away from the significance of Boston’s pain or its trauma, nor the sadness of the families that have lost loved ones. The city is traumatized, its people hurt but Bostonians are strong, resilient and united. I believe that in time Boston, my city, will recover, get on its feet, and find its stride. Runners will come back, perhaps in even greater numbers to show solidarity and resilience for those that lost their lives in 2013.

 An act of terror like this, however, has so many more implications, both visible and invisible. Immediately after the detonation a Saudi man was tackled by bystanders, falsely accused, apprehended and searched by the police. While you cannot criticize the police’s reaction in handling a suspected culprit, you can and should criticize why this particular innocent man, injured by the same blast as others around him, was targeted.

People of color are likely to be targeted after alleged terror attacks. We are treated like refugees, without official protection or guarantee of our safety, or our rights. These individual rights are too easily and too often waived to protect “America.” But this begs the question - whose America? This frightens me; it is the root of my nightmares. Why? Because I do not feel like I am part of this America that the government is protecting. This frightens me because even after having finished 26.2 miles, I felt the urge to run.

When the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, sent 16 bombs between 1978 and1995 targeting innocent Americans, we were under threat from a domestic terrorist who was simply “crazy, deranged, twisted.” But when Seung Hui Cho massacred 32 at Virginia Tech it was tied to an entire race. When Al-Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers, immediately a group of Americans lost their liberty and rights. Soon, being of a certain color, wearing certain clothing, speaking a certain language, or even being a socially awkward person of color at a university meant inescapable scrutiny. In the eyes of the government and the public, we were no longer Americans. We were simply suspects.

What if this terrorist is another person of color? How would the public react after being brainwashed by films like “Olympus Has Fallen”? The aftermath of Virginia Tech was tough for me as an Asian American, but Boston is a place I call home. What if by default I become an “enemy,” a “dangerous threat” due to the action of a single twisted individual? What if I become hated and feared by the same children that gleefully shared high-fives, smiles and orange slices along the marathon course? Will I have to leave? What will happen to my younger brother in the 6^th grade? This is the unseen terrorism that struck on April 15^th 2013 – on September 11, 2001. This is the unseen terrorism that grips the lives of people of color in the United States daily; especially those of Arab Americans.

While all Americans suffer from the immediate and visible impact of acts of terror, there is another wave of terrorism that stirs in its wake. Hatred and racism makes these moments of fear especially unbearable for people of color. While many of us are emotionally and physically equally affected by these traumas, we are often stripped of our rights to speak, our rights to mourn, our rights to cope. It is during periods of terror that our beloved communities, friends, neighbors, teachers, and city turn us away. Our only crime: being born a certain way. In moments like this, I try to remember that humanity is common across all races, and that love and compassion must be universal. These deranged individual uses the tools of evil to distort our minds and turn us against each other. But they do not represent their race, ethnicity, or religion. If Unabomber doesn’t represent all Harvard graduates, all Michigan Alums, all whites, then Al-Qaeda should not represent all Arabs, all Muslims. It is moments like this that we must remind ourselves: united we will stand but divided we fall. It is moments like this that we must remember that a marathon is not over until all its participants cross the finish line.

I grieve for Boston. I fume for Boston. But most importantly I hope and pray for Boston. I hope that the culprit will be brought to justice; I hope that the Boston community heals and unites against such an act of terror. But I also pray that Boston does not betray its character, dignity and greatness when the culprit is found. I pray Boston be better than and above the terror of racism and hatred that threatens to engulf this country. I pray that Boston remains true to its citizens and inhabitants. I pray that Boston remains….Boston. 

0 What We're Reading Today (4-16-13): Boston Marathon (UPDATED)

I have the early shift at work this morning and normally I try to toss together a "What We're Reading Today" for everyone when they wake up.  Today it's heavy on the information relating to the Boston Marathon.  Looking at my tabs now, I think everything except for one Russia Today update regarding a 7.8 earthquake in Iran is about the Marathon, different people who were there, heroes, photographs, and personal stories of people squaring themselves with a rupture in narrative.

(Getty)

Two if by Sorrow: Boston and its Losses - The New Yorker
Jill Lepore

'Please don't be a Muslim': Boston marathon blasts draw condemnation and dread in Muslim world - Washington Post
Max Fisher

The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On - The Atlantic
Bruce Schneier

Photos of the Boston Marathon Bombing - The Atlantic

War Zone at Mile 26: 'So Many People Without Legs' - New York Times
Tim Rohan

The Boston Marathon: All My Tears, All My Love - The Nation
Dave Zirin

The Man in the Cowboy Hat: Meet Carlos Arrededondo, a Hero of the Boston Bombings - Mother Jones
Tasneem Raja

Boylston, and Cataloguing Bedtime - Who-Witz
Seth Hurwitz

When You Attack a Crowd of People, You Get a Crowd of Witnesses - The Atlantic Cities
Emily Badger

Patton Oswalt Pens Inspirational Missive on Humanity's Inherent Goodness in Wake of Boston Marathon Bombing - Gawker
Neetzan Zimmerman

Boston Marathon Explosions: The Heroes who Responded to the Blasts - The Daily Beast
Nina Strochlic

Boston Marathon Bombing Called 'a Madrid-Style Event' - The Daily Beast
Lloyd Grove

On Marathon Monday, Three Dead, Over One-Hundred Injured in Explosions - Tufts Daily
James Pouliot

Mainers describe 'war scene' and 'chaos' - Portland Press Herald
David Hench and Glenn Jordan

Boston Marathon: The Last 5 - Facebook
In light of today's tragedy, let's remember, honor, and stand up for all those affected by the incident that occurred at the 117th Boston Marathon. We invite everyone to join us on Friday, April 19 at 4:30pm to walk from BC to Boston to stand united. For anyone who did not get to finish, For anyone who was injured, and For anyone who lost their life...we will walk. We will walk to show that we decide when our marathon ends.

7.8 Earthquake hits Iran, felt in New Delhi, Gulf States - Russia Today

UPDATE: 8:27 AM EASTERN TIME

London Marathon will go ahead as planned, sports minister says - Guardian
Owen Gibson, Peter Walker, Vikram Dodd

The Enemy-Industrial Complex - The Nation
Tom Engelhardt

Person of Interest's Apartment Searched - Politico
Kevin Cirilli

Politicians, pundits, debate the 'terror' label - Politico

A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable - Boston Globe
Kevin Cullen

Documenting Tragedy: Vine and the Boston Marathon - Society Pages
Whitney Erin Boesel

UPDATE: 4:08 PM EASTERN TIME

The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions - Guardian
Glenn Greenwald

The Many Amazing Ways Boston's College Community has Responded to Monday's Tragedy - BostInno
Lauren Landry

Boston Marathon bombings: Devices with pressure cookers, experts say - Chicago Tribune
Tribune Wire

Computer glitch: AA grounds all flights through 5 p.m. ET - USA Today
Ben Mutzabaugh

Security Is a Challenge for Sprawling Marathons - New York Times
Ken Belson

Boston the day after: More security; second victim named - USA Today
Melanie Eversley and John Bacon

Day after blasts, Back Bay 'looks like Armageddon' - Boston Globe
Casey Ross, Beth Healy, Jenn Abelson, Erin Ailworth

Investigation of Boston Marathon bombings continues - Boston Globe
Shelley Murphy, Chelsea Conaboy, Martin Finucane

You May Leave Boston, but Boston Never Leaves - The Atlantic
Andrew Cohen

The Promise of the Boston Marathon - The Atlantic
Colin Daileda

6 False Thing You Heard About the Boston Marathon - Mother Jones
Dana Liebelson and Tim Murphy

The Unfinished Race - New York Review of Books
Hugh Eakin

How the Boston Marathon helped the fight for equal rights - The New Republic
Nora Caplan-Bricker

UPDATE: 9:01 PM EASTERN TIME

Your Stories: Were You in Boston on Marathon Day? - WBUR

Boston Bomb Clues Surface - Wall Street Journal
Evan Perez, Devlin Barrett, and Andrew Grossman

FBI examines shrapnel from Boston bombs as nation mourns - LA Times
Richard A. Serrano, Shashank Bengali, and Michael Muskal

McManus: We're Safer than We Think - LA Times
Doyle McManus

Boston bombing 'used pressure cooker packed with metal' - Guardian
Ed Pilkington, Adam Gabbatt, Dan Roberts, Matt Williams

From Sandy Hook to the Streets of Boston, Terror Anew - New York Times
Peter Applebome

BU grad student was killed in Boston Marathon bombings - Boston Globe
Globe staff

Source: Investigators recover circuit board believed used to detonate Boston blasts - Boston.com
Shelley Murphy, Chelsea Conaboy, Milton J. Valencia, Martin Finucane

I watched the Boston Marathon from above. These are my photos. - Deadspin
Ben Levine

UPDATE: 12:30 AM (4/17/13)

The Saudi Marathon Man - The New Yorker
Amy Davidson

Share Your Story - Boston Globe
You

(Reuters)

0 42.195 km with Keith Haring on Boylston Street

I figured that I might as well put words to the page if I'm going to just sit around looking at Twitter and not doing my work -- at the very least this is artistic, to some extent.  This might not be the most constructive thing or reach any real "point" but it is more writing than I have done today -- 140-characters-at-a-time notwithstanding.

One of my favorite features of the Boston Marathon is the ability to track the runners.  This meant that for me -- and a bunch of my peers who were cooped-up reading the writing of crusty old guys instead of out getting drunk at BC, BU, or Northeastern -- we were able to feel some level of excitement for our friends who were running the marathon this year; even if only through a Google Maps portal, we could marvel at their accomplishments as they went hour after hour through Framingham, Wellesley, Newton, and right into Boston.

I was sitting in the Senate office with Andrew pretending to do work. In reality though I wasn't reading the aforementioned crusty old guys; I was watching the little Keith Haring-style icons pump their arms and legs across eastern Massachusetts, over the hills, along the Charles, past crowds of their friends and family.

I switched the to the live feed of the finish line when I saw that Jessie was nearing Copley Square with Riley keeping pace behind her.  At best, I figured, I could get a screenshot of her crossing the finish line since I had decided at the last minute not to go -- which sucks because there is no sweeter image in your head running down the last 1/2 mile with Cee-Cee, with Jen, with Jessie, with Alden, with whoever.  Well, I guess one sweeter image would be turning that last corner and seeing the finish line -- but still.  The point is that they do 26 miles on their own -- the least we could do is offer them our spirit for the last half-mile.

Disbelief replaced relief, though.  Disbelief that the Twitter feed on the side of the page had changed so quickly from people praising their friends' efforts, sharing InstaGram photos, and posting times. 

3:36:14

3:41:49

3:45:02

#BostonMarathon explosion heard near finish line

3:53:32

Explosions heard at finish line of #BostonMarathon

3:54:11

Grossly unsettling.  Internally disturbing.  Defying all sense of how and who and what should happen next, a complete rupture to the narrative.  There wasn't a jubilant scene but instead havoc and panic, police cars parking on the finish line and spectators darting away from the site of the explosion.  Runners streaming in confused, exhausted, and deprived of the jubilation that everyone is entitled to after 26.2 miles of feet-on-pavement ceaseless motion.  Everything pixelated and distorted.

Already late for work, I scurried down Professor's Row and into the gymnasium to sit behind a security desk and do work -- again, lies.  I sat down, plugged in my Macbook, opened Google Chrome, opened Facebook, the Associated Press, and two Twitter tabs and began retweeting.  How quickly this had all changed from waiting for the perfect instant to command-shift-4 the moment of triumph to going between police and EMT scanners, Reuters, Anonymous, and Boston Globe updates.  Thankfully, my friend, Alvaro, started a hashtag for all the Tufts students to coordinate the locations of their friends who were volunteers, runners, etc.: #TuftsRunners.  It was remarkable, absolutely, the speed with which Tufts students were together and tweeting back and forth the names and locations of missing-then-found loved ones, fact-checking and cross-referencing reports, and keeping everyone calm.

But even three hours later it's still all so unresolved -- and I don't mean the why and the who.  I can imagine those things, to be honest.  A right-wing terrorist, someone whose country has been defiled by US (cultural) imperialism, or any of the "usual suspects" (whatever that might mean when we look at the data and don't just stoke Islamophobia; I'm looking at you, New York Post).

The more irksome and pervasively disconcerting component to this is just how deprived and robbed and cheated I feel like so many people were, the runners and the spectators.  What were the statistics on the day?  

Marathon numbers: 23,326 official starters, 17,584 finished the race. 4,496 runners crossed 40K but did not finish.
— SB Nation (@sbnation) April 15, 2013

Jessie was .4 miles from the finish line.  Jen just over a half-mile.  Cee-Cee only a mile away.  Where is their re-run, or do-over, or chance to run those last 2,000 ft with their friends and loved ones cheering them on, elated at the feat of human endurance that was just achieved?  There isn't one. There isn't one and that really hurts.

Or how to square the reality that being one of the pictures in the news or being safely at home watching it all filter through was a stroke of luck -- that the T was delayed, you missed the Joey, or your friend pulled you to Newbury St. instead of Boylston to avoid the crowd.  That street corner is so tangible, touchable, and remembered; it was shopping with your bros; it was exploring Boston as a freshman; it was Winter Bash and where you took your family when they visited.  Any of us could have been on that street corner and so many of us were just feet away, saved by a lucky decision to turn left instead of right.

And I can't help but think about the kids in other parts of the world who deal with this even more routinely than we do here.  The drones that never leave, the explosions that kill 37 and injure 140, or the ever-present reality that each embrace might be the last -- how must it be to live like that.

This is just a reminder, I suppose, that violence, senseless or sensible (if that is a thing), doesn't need to seem rational, coherent, doesn't need to make sense.  It doesn't have to square with our vision of what should or shouldn't happen. It doesn't, in all honesty, need to be anything more than what it is: violence -- violence that injures, violence that hurts, and memories that last.

And meanwhile, the icons that represented where my friends were on the marathon course just keep going -- all nondescript bodies with arms and legs pumping, tirelessly, frozen at 42.195 kilometers but still having never crossed the finish line.

Made this on imgflip.com. Original post here

All of y'all are heroes.

Say when and where and I will toss on my Reebok running shoes and crush that last mile with you, any of you.

0 What We're Reading Today (3-25-13)

Walking While Black in New York - New York Times
Editorial

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - The Atlantic
Anu Partanen

No, Jesus Wasn't a White Dude, Partner - Salon
Chauncey Devega

'Be More Like the Jews' - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Right to Remain Silent - This American Life

What's Wrong with the Term 'Person of Color' - Black Girl Dangerous
Janani

The Trouble with Justin Timberlake's Appropriation of Black Music - ColorLines
Jamilah King

What's Wrong with Fat-Shaming? - Everyday Feminism
Lesley Kinzel

Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations - The Nation
Noura Erakat

The Erased Women of the Wall: Settler Feminism and the Moroccan Quarter - The Feminist Wire
Jimmy Johnson

The Ghetto Is Public Policy - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Trader Joe's Lesson: How to Pay a Living Wage and Still Make Money in Retail - The Atlantic
Sophie Quinton

What Rush Limbaugh Got Right About Beyonce - The Atlantic
Noah Berlatsky

0 What We're Reading Today (3-20-13)

It's snowy in Medfaaahd so I have had plenty of time to read today.  If my tabs are correct you should have about 15 goodies to pick from for your daily dose of knowledge.  Aproveche!

Also a big, Eid e shoma mobarak to all my Persian fam and friends out there!

The Modern King in the Arab Spring - The Atlantic
Jeffrey Goldberg

Storify: Jordanians' Reactions to the Atlantic's Feature on King Abdullah - 7iber

Sex, Violence, and Radical Islam: Why Persepolis Belongs in Public Schools - The Atlantic
Noah Berlatsky

Race Didn't Cost Abigail Fisher Her Spot at the University of Texas - The Atlantic Wire
Nikole Hannah-Jones

I Am Not Your Wife, Sister, or Daughter. I am a person. - The Belle Jar
Anne Theriault

On Steubenville, Guns, and Healthy Echo Chambers - ColorLines
Akiba Solomon

America's defender of the status quo(s) - Haaretz
Amira Hass

Arundhati Roy on Iraq War's 10th: Bush May be Gone, but "Psychosis" of US Foreign Policy Prevails - Democracy Now
Amy Goodman

Iraq War's 10th Anniversary: Occupation and Insurgency - The Atlantic: In Focus
(part 2 of a 3-part series)

Arguing Iraq--Ten Years Later: A symposium - The New Republic
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Paul Berman, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Greenberg, James P. Rubin, David Rieff, and John B. Judis

How Obama Can Learn to Speak Israeli: Advice to the president on his visit - The New Republic
Yossi Klein Halevi

AUDIO: New York's Police Union Worked With the NYPD to Set Arrest and Summons Quotas - The Nation
Ross Tuttle

Rosa Parks Syndrome in Palestine - Jacobin
Avi Asher-Schapiro

The Forgotten Rosa Parks - Jacobin
Samir Sonti

Toure Makes the Case Against Calling Immigrants 'Illegals' - ColorLines
Jorge Rivas

0 What We're Reading Today (3-11-13)

The Liberals Against Affirmative Action - New York Times
David Leonhardt

Why Does America Pretend it Doesn't Hate Women - Feminspire
Anisha Ahuja

The Crimson's Anti-Palestinian Bias - Harvard Political Review
Lena Awwad, Giacomo Bagarella, Asmaa Rimawi, Hannah Schafer

On Questioning the Jewish State - New York Times
Joseph Levine

Venezuela After Chavez - Jacobin
Jeffrey R. Weber

The End of the Two-State Solution: Why the window is closing on Middle-East peace - The New Republic
Ben Birnbaum

Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester - Gawker
Max Read

The Threat of an Imperial President - The Nation
Tom Hayden

Did NYPD Entrap Ahmed Ferhani - The Nation
John Knefel

0 What We're Reading Today (3-1-13)

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case - The New Republic
Yochai Benkler

We Aren't the World - The Pacific Standard
Ethan Watters

Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over - Mother Jones
Adam Serwer

Rahm on the Ropes - The Nation
Rick Perlstein

Congress Honors Rosa Parks while the Supreme Court Targets the Voting Rights Act - The Nation
Ari Berman

Goodbye, Bob - Gawker
John Cook

Go for the Throat! - Slate
John Dickerson

0 What We're Reading Today (2-27-13)

Three-Fifths Compromise; Slavery; Journalism; Racism; Chicago Police Department; Mali; Counterterrorism; Obama; Republicans

The Constitution's Immoral Compromise - New York Times
Room for Debate

There is no Indonesia Model for the Arab Spring - Foreign Policy
Tom Pepinsky

Racism, Torture, and Impunity in Chicago - The Nation
Flint Taylor

House of Cads: The Psycho-sexual Ordeal of Reporting in Washington - The New Republic
Marian Cogan

Annihilate: Obama's Very Secret Plot to End the Republican Party - The New Republic
Michael Kinsley

A Flawed America in Context - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi N. Coates

Iraq to Mali: the Changing Calculus of War - Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera Empire

0 What We're Reading Today (1-22-13): Inauguration 2013 and the Return of the Liberal Messiah

Obama's Second Inaugural Will Stand the Test of Time - The New Republic
Jonathan Cohn

"We the People": the Sleight of Hand at the Heart of Obama's Second Inaugural - The New Republic
John B. Judis

Obama Prepares to Govern from the Left - Buzzfeed
Zeke Miller & Ben Smith

President Obama's Not-Quite Camelot - Politico
Jennifer Epstein & Glen Thrush

Obama Testifies to the Power of Government - Politico
Jonathan Allen

Obama's Startling Second Inaugural - The Atlantic
James Fallows

The 2nd Inauguration of Barack Obama in Photos - The Atlantic

The Audacity of Fluff: A Critical Reading of Obama's Inaugural Address - The Atlantic
Conor Friedersdorf

BONUS:

The 22 Most Fabulous Beyonce Moments of the Inauguration

0 Snakes on McCain: 10 Best Articles of 2012

This is just me -- can't speak for the rest of Snakes on McCain we're all different people and I, unlike Andrew, have not had any strange dreams about mud wrestling with Hu Jintao.  I'm sure that I missed some articles and I definitely have a bias with respect to what I like to read -- like any blogger.  Also, I'm a twenty-something so I think I know everything.
I decided to do this in the shower yesterday morning so since then I've been scouring the internet in the hopes of stringing together enough keywords to direct me toward the articles I need but, alas, I'm sure that some have slipped by and will go uncelebrated.  Feel free to sound off in the comments on any pieces you think I missed.  These are purely articles I found on the web so anything that is exclusively in print is undetected to the all-knowing-eye that is this SOM list.
Ranking them would be too tough so this is an unranked top 10 with some honorable mentions toward the bottom.  Sadly, I'm not clever enough to have a grading rubric devised.  Some are narratives I wish we talked about more, others are literary and tugged at my heartstrings, then there are others that I just find illuminating and wanted to share (again).
Happy reading and thanks for a great year.  I'll put the stats for Snakes on McCain in a post closer to New Year's Day so you guys can see just how great you all have been.

#ForTheBoys

Holla at the homies (some missing)

________________________________________________________

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

Kiese Laymon

Gawker, July 28

Fear of a Black President

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Atlantic, September 2012

The Anchor

Laura M. Colarusso

Washington Monthly, May/June 2012

On Affirmative Action, African-Americanism, and Anger

Michel-Ange (Mickey) Desruisseaux

With Apologies to Bill Bennet, October 21

Dear President Schapiro: Why I Can't Recommend Northwestern University Anymore

Greg Wright

Wright and Left, October 22

Becoming Obama: Young Barack Obama in Love

David Maraniss

Vanity Fair, June 2012

For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall

Jason DeParle

New York Times, December 22

The Consequences of Caring

Bill Simmons

Grantland, June 8

Kanye West Is Better at His Job Than I Am at Mine (But I'm Way Better at Being a Fake-Ass Feminist)

Kiese Laymon

Gawker, August 25

A New Kind of Blackness: Remarks at Tufts University's Black Solidarity Day

William Brandon Lacy Campos

My Feet Only Walk Forward, November 5

HONORABLE MENTIONS 

The Caging of America
Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker, January 30*

Obama's Way

Michael Lewis

Vanity Fair, October 2012

Destiny is Ruthless

Brian Phillips

Grantland, August 10

Inside Bashar al-Assad's Army

Mike Giglio

The Daily Beast, December 10

Inside the Free Syrian Army's 'Candy Factories,' the Secret Rebel Arms Workshops

Anna Therese Day

The Daily Beast, October 23

What Bill Clinton Wrote vs What Bill Clinton Said

Dashiell Bennett

The Atlantic Wire, September 6

The 'Cac Responds to Kate Upton Body Haters
Emile M. Cioran and Anonymous**
In the 'Cac, July 18
**I'm the anon

Reprint: An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College
Angie Epifano
In the 'Cac, October 18

So you're thinking of Birthright: A primer by students who went on birthright for those still considering the trip

Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (re-published by Mondoweiss)

Mondoweiss, December 20

'Dialogue' stands in way of justice in Palestine

Samee Sulaiman, Sami Kishawi

The Chicago Maroon, December 4

Read a Book! Or, Why I Don't Talk to Strange White Folks About Race

Mia McKenzie

Black Girl Dangerous, July 16

The Israel Lobby Finds a New Face: Black College Students

Seth Freed Wessler

ColorLines, January 18

* BONUS: Top 10 New Yorker Stories of 2012 - The Apostate; The Obama Memos; The Caging of America; The Story of a Suicide; Spoiled Rotten; We Are Alive (Bruce Springsteen); Big Med; Super-Rich Irony; One on One; The Choice