There is a kind of noise that comes after a shot. Not only the sound in the street, but the sound in the mind. People rush to fill the silence with a story, because silence feels like weakness. And in America, silence is treated like surrender.
So a woman is dead, an agent is alive, and a short video floats through phones like a torn page from a longer book… Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
One of my students put this article under my nose yesterday during a class discussion. He is Swiss, and the original article was in German. So here is a translation of the gist of it:
Germany: In front of a nursing home for people with dementia in Duisburg, a fake bus stop has recently been installed. A fictitious timetable hangs on the typical bus … Read the rest
I once knew a man—let us call him Mr. Granite—who had a talent for moral architecture. He built his opinions the way some people build coastal fortresses: thick walls, narrow gates, and very few windows.
Over coffee, in a place where the chairs were designed to make you leave promptly, Mr. Granite announced, with a pleasant certainty, “I would never do something like that.”
He said it the way people … Read the rest
The voice message is a beautiful invention. It combines the commitment of a phone call with the accountability of a napkin thrown into the sea. It is the technological equivalent of leaning into someone’s ear at a loud party and saying, “I have something important to tell you,” and then wandering off mid-sentence because a song came on. If you’re the sender, it feels efficient. If you’re the recipient, it … Read the rest
Athens, in the middle of the sixth century before our era, was not yet the museum city of marble postcards. It was a place of dust, olives, arguments, and men who could recite laws in the morning and break them politely in the afternoon. The Athenians had recently received a precious gift: rules that were meant to be stronger than families. Solon, the lawgiver, had tried to take a city … Read the rest
