John Carlos

"Not every young white individual would have the gumption, the nerve, the backbone, to stand there," he said. John Carlos recounted the conversation they had before going out for the medal ceremony. They asked Peter Norman if he believed in human rights. He said he did. They asked him if he believed in God. Norman, who came from a Salvation Army background, said he believed strongly in God.

"We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat. He said, 'I'll stand with you'." Carlos said he expected to see fear in Norman's eyes. He didn't. "I saw love."

"Peter never flinched [on the dais]. He never turned his eyes, he never turned his head. He never said so much as 'ouch'.

1968 Olympics, Mexico.
Photo by John Dominis

As reported by Martin Flanagan, Sydney Morning Herald, after Peter Norman's funeral services, Melbourne, Australia, October 10, 2006. Tommie Smith and John Carlos were pallbearers at Peter Norman's funeral.

Brandon Keim

“Video games could be expected to have a larger effect than media violence. The player is participating. They’re being reinforced,” says Rowell Huesmann, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “The important thing is repetition. I think any child can play Grand Theft Auto or a first-person shooter a few times, and it’s not going to have much effect. But if they play day in and day out, over a period of years, any psychologist who understands the power of observational learning is going to find it hard to believe that it’s not going to have a major effect on increasing risk.”

Slutkin and Huesmann believe that violence is contagious, spreading in a manner similar to infectious disease, but with behaviors rather than microbes as the instruments of transmission. Of course, pathogens don’t always cause disease: Many other factors, such as a person’s immune system strength, alter an infection’s course. In keeping with this analogy, first-person shooters weaken the psychological immune system. They change the odds of whether violence takes root or whether a person can resist it.

From What Science Knows about Video Games and Violence February 28 2013, NOVA Next via PBS

Charles M. Blow

We seem caught in a cycle of escalating atrocities without an easy way out, without enough clear voices of calm, without tools for reduction, without resolutions that will satisfy.

This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a societal wedge?

Will the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as selective, discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives are taken, be heard above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus for a cumulative argument?

...

I know well that when people speak of love and empathy and honor in the face of violence, it can feel like meeting hard power with soft, like there is inherent weakness in an approach that leans so heavily on things so ephemeral and even clichéd.

But that is simply an illusion fostered by those of little faith.

The higher calling — the harder trial — is the belief in the ultimate moral justice and the inevitable victory of righteousness over wrong. This requires an almost religious faith in fate, and that can be hard for some to accept, but accept it we must.

The moment any person comes to accept as justifiable an act of violence upon another — whether physical, spiritual or otherwise — that person has already lost the moral battle, even if he is currently winning the somatic one.

When we all can see clearly that the ultimate goal is harmony and not hate, rectification and not retribution, we have a chance to see our way forward. But we all need to start here and now, by doing this simple thing: Seeing every person as fully human, deserving every day to make it home to the people he loves.

From A Week From Hell [Op-Ed] NY Times, online July 8, 2016 (in print July 11, 2016)

Frank Bruni

The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is: one sustained note from the vast and varied music that it holds, one redundant fragrance from a garden of infinite possibility. . . . . .we customize the news we consume and the political beliefs we’re exposed to as never before. And this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.

~How Facebook Warps Our Worlds, May 21 2016

Marriage

N: Oh, wife. You are so nice to me...sometimes.
D: Sometimes? You needed to use a qualifier with that one?

Steve Lewandowski

We all got up and drove quickly to
the farmers' market to buy cases
of broccoli, crates of celery, several
bunches of leeks with a strong smell,
boxes of meaty cauliflower blossoms, dirt
caked beets & a basket of huge carrots.

from Write a poem using the word "suffuse"

The Writers' Almanac

About Eudora Welty's house:

You can tour her house and garden in Jackson [Mississippi] for $5, the house at 1119 Pinehurst Street that Welty moved into in 1925 with her parents when she was 16 and lived in until she died in 2001. The garden was planted by her mother Chestina so that there'd be something in bloom each season. There are larkspur, hollyhocks, and snapdragons for the spring; phlox, zinnias, and blue salvia for the summer; asters, chrysanthemums, and spider lilies for the fall, and camellias and pansies in winter. 

 --"The Writers' Almanac," April 13, 2016

NEH

You know what's great? I can buy my kayak in the same place where I buy my bacon! Also, playground sand! 

--My spouse, expounding upon the virtues of Menards

Snippets from Colette

Isn't it amazing how many common household items can be used for sewing tricks?

If you have some extra Press'n Seal wrap in your pantry, use it to keep your loose buttons together. You can even punch holes in the sheets and store them in binders. Or just chuck them in a drawer, because you can be confident that all buttons will stay with their mates!

(This tip is going to change my life. -Ed.)

--from Colette's Snippets newsletter emailed on March 29, 2016

Paul

The fact only best friend is someone a lot of more to come go back to my house is not so you don't know what to I love you ok so yo face and you

-love letter from Paul, using only QuickType suggestions on iPhone.

Lily Tomlin

I gained another pound today, but I think it's a pound of knowledge.

--as Frankie Bergstein in Grace and Frankie (2015)

Marriage

Conversation before we went out for dinner on Saturday evening.

N: Are you ready?
D: Yes, I'm not changing my clothes - let's go.
N: Are you going to put your sweater on the right way?
D: What do you mean?
N: Your sweater has been on inside out all day. Maybe you should fix that before we go.
D: All day? Why didn't you tell me before?
N: I don't know. I guess it didn't matter before.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters...Move on. Whatever else happens, stay busy. Find something to do--anything, even a different sort of creative work altogther--just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. (I always lean on this wise advice, from the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton, on how to survive melancholy: "Be not solitary, be not idle.")

Go walk the dog, go pick up every bit of trash on the street outside your home, go walk the dog again, go bake a peach cobbler, go paint some pebbles with brightly colored nail polish and put them in a pile. You might think it's procrastination, but--with the right intention--it isn't; it's motion. And any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.

So wave your arms around. Make something. Do something. Do anything.

--in Big Magic

Elizabeth Gilbert

It makes me sad when I fail. It disappoints me. Disappointment can make me feel disgusted with myself, or surly toward others. By this point in my life, though, I've learned how to navigate my own disappointment without plummeting too far into death spirals of shame, rage, or inertia. That's because I have come to understand what part of me is suffering when I fail: it's just my ego. It's that simple.

An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call "a hungry ghost" -- forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.

My saving grace is this: I know that I am not only an ego; I am also a soul. And I know that my soul doesn't care a whit about reward or failure. My soul is not guided by dreams of praise or fears of criticism. My soul doesn't even have language for such notions. My soul, when I tend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will ever be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. And since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, I take refuge there, and it feeds my soul, and it quiets the hungry ghost, thereby saving me from the most dangerous aspect of myself.

So whenever that brittle voice is dissatisfaction emerges within me, I can say, "Ah, my ego! There you are, old friend!" It's the same when I'm being criticized and I notice myself reacting with outrage, heartache, or defensiveness. It's just my ego, flaring up and testing its power...I try not to take [it] too seriously because I know that it's merely my ego that has been wounded--never my soul.

At such times, I can always steady my life once more by returning to my soul. I ask it, "And what is it that you want, dear one?" The answer is always the same: "More wonder, please."

--in Big Magic 

Elizabeth Gilbert

I recently read a fabulous blog by a writer named Mark Manson, who said that the secret to finding your purpose in life is to answer this question in total honesty: "What's your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?"

What Manson means is that every single pursuit--no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem--comes with its own brand of shit sandwich, its own lousy side effects. As Manson writes with profound wisdom, "Everything sucks, some of the time." You just have to decide what sort of suckage you're willing to deal with. So the question is not so much "What are you passionate about?" The question is "What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?"

--in Big Magic (2015)