Links
3 stars
The Hague on Trial: The Tangled Case of Karim Khan and the I.C.C. | New Yorker
16-minute read
The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, in the aftermath of the carnage in Rwanda and the Balkans, was designed to hold accountable future perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It got off to a slow start: during the court’s first two decades in operation, it issued fewer than forty public arrest warrants. Most targeted African strongmen or warlords; the court almost never took on the major international powers or their closest allies, and critics complained that it effectively punished the weak while sparing the strong.
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Khan boasted to colleagues that, in his first three years on the job, he had obtained more than forty new warrants, some not yet public. Among the public warrants were orders for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and top Russian military leaders, for war crimes in Ukraine; the leaders of Hamas, for its murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023; and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for the willful killing of civilians in Gaza, and for employing the denial of food as a weapon of war.
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Selective leaks from the ambiguous phone call—in particular, Khan’s references to Palestinians and other victims being “on the cusp of progress”—have improbably bound together the woman’s allegation of sexual abuse with the international power struggle over the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan and his lawyers have contended that Netanyahu and his allies are exploiting a vulnerable woman in order to discredit the case against the Israeli leaders. Netanyahu, in turn, has repeatedly claimed that Khan sought the warrants only to divert attention from the woman’s charges.
Original link | Archive.is link
Children of the Holocaust buried their identities to survive | Aeon
11-minute read
By 1991, Kosinski had died and I’d left Wall Street for graduate school. I began researching the Holocaust’s hidden child survivors. That’s when I discovered AMCHA, the Israeli Center for Mental Health and Social Support of Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation. Yvonne Tauber, who treated many formerly hidden children at the Center, coined the term ‘compound personality’ to describe how these people presented in therapy: a single individual with an external, age-appropriate self, concealing a suppressed, traumatised-child self from wartime.
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The surprising point of convergence is a single page between Part 1 and Part 2 of Perec’s book. Following the established rhythm of a chapter in italic font (fiction) being followed by a chapter in Roman font (autobiography), I would have expected an autobiographical passage about his mother’s death at Auschwitz to follow on from the narrative about the shipwrecked boy. Instead, what appears is a page that’s blank, save for an ellipsis in brackets: ‘(…)’. Here, in five keystrokes, was the soundless wail of the repressed-child self in Perec that so many other hidden child survivors experienced. The ellipsis, the missing letters, the alternating chapters, the elaborate patterns. These weren’t just literary games but ways of approaching what couldn’t be confronted directly: something was there, something was gone.
Cardiography | The New York Review of Books
10-minute read
I feel permitted to use these metaphors and say these unoriginal things anew because they sawed open my chest and stopped my heart and changed the prosody of my body. And I’m hardly alone; I have joined a community: each year they do this—at least the sawing and the stopping part—to more than two million people, which is about the population of the heart of Paris. I picture a Paris where everyone within the city limits has had open-heart surgery, an open city. I am in the hospital bed facing left but staring at the ceiling hitting the little button that gives me narcotics and imagining that even the Parisian birds and mice and squirrels have had their hearts stopped with a cold potassium solution so that surgeons, who have themselves only recently had their ribs pried apart, can do their delicate work in a still and bloodless field.
The intense emotional lability that immediately follows the procedure is not to be confused with the cardiac blues, which are a duller, deeper, postpartum-like despair. That first night, while (the) you slept, the composite nurse helped feed me ice chips and Jell-O with a plastic spoon. I wept and wept and laughed at my weeping, which caused excruciating pain—try not to cough, laugh, or sneeze in the first days following your sternotomy. I cannot tell you how delicious it was—orange Jell-O, ice pellets, tear salt, the height of Parisian cuisine; I cannot tell you how I loved the nurse who spoon-fed me so gently in the dark.
Original link | Archive.is link
Second and Long | The American Scholar
16-minute read
In 1971, Alfred A. Knopf published a debut novel by a young poet from Mississippi, who prior to becoming a writer had played offensive tackle on the Vanderbilt University football team. Eponymously titled Joiner, the book is narrated by Eugene “Sonny” Joiner, like its author a native of the Magnolia State, as well as a keen student of philosophy, religion, history, literature, and art. Joiner is himself a former college football star, good enough to have played a year in the NFL with the fictional Dallas Bulls. Though he tosses the n-word around at will, he is otherwise enlightened on the issue of civil rights and has, with a rifle, dispatched a murderous racist redneck to rid the world of such a scourge. He has killed one other man in self-defense using only his fist. When we meet him, he’s out of the NFL, teaching at the Unitarian Progressive School for boys, residing in a Fort Worth motel with his mistress, gorging himself on peanut butter and graham crackers, while planning a return to Mississippi to wreak havoc at the wedding of his ex-wife and an erstwhile high school teammate.
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It was the kind of novelistic debut most young writers can only dream of. Anticipation for its follow-up ran high.
The 35-year-old author’s name was James Whitehead. Though he lived and wrote for another 32 years, the second novel never appeared.
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When I met Jim in August 1981, I was 24 years old, about to embark on what I dared to dream would be my own journey as a novelist. I was a first-year graduate student in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where Jim had been teaching since 1965. I had been in town for three and a half days when the newly installed phone in my one-bedroom apartment rang for the first time. I assumed the call was from my parents, since I hadn’t given the number to anyone else and didn’t know a single person in the state of Arkansas.
“Is this Yarbrough?” a gruff voice asked. I admitted that it was. “How the hell long have you been here?” A couple of days, I responded, before asking whom I was speaking to. “It’s Whitehead,” the voice growled. “Were you intending to come over here and introduce yourself or not?” I assured him I’d love to come over—it seemed dangerous not to—so he gave me directions to his house and said he’d expect me in a few minutes.
Though I would learn that he was nearly always the first person to welcome the new poets and fiction writers, it turned out that he was especially eager to meet me.
2 stars
I fell at the top of a mountain – and knew I had to haul my broken body down or die in the snow | The Guardian
6-minute read
That night in the tent, Muenchrath suddenly felt awake. “I had what I call my visit from death, almost like an entity.” She sensed a heavy shadow hovering above her body, not menacing but peaceful. “Now, with the passage of time, I kind of perceive that I was experiencing the life force of my body starting to leave, and that’s when I made a vow that if I lived until morning, I would live my greatest dreams.” For her, this meant visiting the Himalayas. “For some reason, I thought, ‘Make it to morning, and everything will be OK,’ but clearly I needed to make it for another week.”
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They remained in the tent for two full days and three nights, while the storm raged outside and they decided what to do. It was too risky for Ken to leave Muenchrath on the mountain alone to seek help. They had to make it down together, carrying their equipment, because they wouldn’t be able to reach safety in a single day. It seemed impossible, but Muenchrath was desperate to leave. “When we packed up to start our journey out, I didn’t look back at the camp. I did not want to see that place. I wanted only to look forward.” She was weak, injured and could barely move, and she would need to cover a rocky and snowy mountain pass, a 4,800ft canyon and hazards including fast-moving meltwater and thick vegetation as they got to lower altitudes. It must have seemed unthinkable.
Monogamy is good, actually | Natal Gazing
7-minute read
Modern marriage has a marketing problem. Is marriage really oppressive to women? Or imprisoning to men? Why do we even have monogamy? In this essay, I’ll argue that monogamy is a little like capitalism: It’s the worst system available, except for all the others. Humans are designed to be mostly monogamous, but there’s a catch: we’re also designed to be flexible, opportunistic cheaters on occasion.
The Quest to Resurrect a Texas Ghost Town | Texas Highways
8-minute read
I’ve always loved a ghost town. Maybe it’s because I’m a fan of history. Maybe I’m just nosy. But I’m obsessed with seeing how people used to live, imagining the stories in what they leave behind. I can see a ghost town in my mind—dusty old buildings, crumbling bricks, sun-bleached boards, and signs blasted clean by the wind. A general store. A railway depot. A courthouse. A jail. Maybe a saloon. Off the main street, a few houses in varying states of decrepitude. I don’t know where the images come from. Movies maybe, or pictures in a magazine. Because I can’t think of a single ghost town I’ve visited, though not for lack of trying.
What Made Blogging Different? | Talking Points Memo
5-minute read
Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)
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I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in. And if they wanted you to engage with them, they’d have to make their own house compelling enough that you’d want to visit.
Our age of kings | Noahpinion
5-minute read
The efflorescence of ideas and communication unleashed by the printing press ultimately helped lead humanity into the age of science and enlightenment. But in the short term — and “short” here meant a hundred years — it caused blood and destruction and chaos and instability. Absolute monarchs were probably one reaction against that instability — elites in countries like France hoped that vesting all power in one capable ruler would enable that ruler to tamp down on the roiling chaos that information technology had unleashed.
The dictators and quasi-dictators of the early 21st century are arguably a similar phenomenon. For the last three or four decades, a series of new media technologies has swept the world, allowing new thinkers and political dissidents to challenge essentially every part of the social order that prevailed before. The spread of Western television was only the beginning. It was quickly followed by the internet, social media, and smartphones.
1 star
#95. Is Dyslexia a School-Produced Disorder? | Play Makes Us Human
7-minute read
I wish here to propose an alternative theory of the origin of dyslexia. I suggest dyslexia is largely an emotional problem brought on by the pressured, anxiety-inducing nature of standard reading instruction in schools. Here is some of the evidence.