Jon Ronson tags along with Seattle's real-life super hero crew and its leader, Phoenix Jones:
Every superhero has his origin story, and as we drive from the hospital to his apartment, Phoenix tells me his. His life, he says, hasn't been a breeze. He lived for a time in a Texas orphanage, was adopted by a Seattle family around age 9, and now spends his days working with autistic kids. One night last summer, someone broke into his car.
There was shattered glass on the floor, and his stepson gashed his knee on it. "I got tired of people doing things that are morally questionable," he says. "Everyone's afraid. It just takes one person to say, 'I'm not afraid.' And I guess I'm that guy." The robber had left his mask in the car, so Phoenix picked it up and made his own mask from it. "He used the mask to conceal his identity," he says. "I used the mask to become an identity." He called himself Phoenix Jones because the Phoenix rises from the ashes and Jones is one of America's most common surnames: He was the common man rising from society's ashes.
Alyssa watched HBO's new documentary Superheroes (trailer above) and found much to praise:
But there’s an element to the superheroes’ work that I think is presented as if it’s totally, unambiguously admirable, and suggests new possibilities for joyful and powerful activism and citizenship. And that’s superheroism as a kind of magical activism. … If putting on a mask and a costume is what gets you to sit down and talk to someone destitute, there’s a value in that empathy however you get there. If being a superhero is what inspired [superhero] Zimmer to take EMT classes and be in a position to provide emergency medical attention, that’s a net value to society.
The Dish 