Seen on Smith Street, May 9, 2013. #streetart #Brooklyn
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.
“
| — | Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust |
Wow - powerful infographic on drone strikes in Pakistan (click through for animation). /via @natematias
(via Out of Sight, Out of Mind: A visualization of drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004)
These are real people and real lives. Try to take that in.
Years ago, I worked in a domestic violence shelter, trying to help women and their children start new lives after leaving their abusers. But the shelter itself, with its cramped communal living spaces and enforced secrecy, created its own distorted power dynamics. Now the domestic violence movement is looking at ways that better building design and an end to the convention of “secret” shelter locations (which were rarely truly secret) can improve the survivors’ experience, and help them take the next steps toward regaining autonomy and agency in their own lives.
