Year: 2013

this high res pic is good news. super clear. someone could actually recognize this bro from this pic: twitter.com/ravisomaiya/st…

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) April 19, 2013

Today on the Dish, Andrew reflected on the meaning of the word ‘terrorism’ after Boston, shamed the New York Post for its unhinged, libelous coverage of the bombing, and chided both Obama and the right for unanimous silence on the most recent report of America’s torture regime. Elsewhere, he defended masturbation, answered readers on the perks of living in New York, and awarded both Glen Reynolds and Kevin Williamson Malkin Award nominations for their ill-advised swipes at Gabby Giffords.

We gathered coverage of the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas and Dreher focused on the sacrifices of volunteer firefighters at the scene. On the Boston bombing beat, security cameras caught the actual suspects in the Faces of the Day while Tim Murphy connected skills learned Iraq to those used by EMS in the aftermath of the explosion.

In political coverage, Douthat speculated why the US experiences so few bombings, we probed the connections between location, gun ownership and suicide, and we rounded up reax to the death of the gun-control bill and the President’s remarks. Rubio took heat from right-wingers for his much-hailed immigration bill, Laura Murphy highlighted the lack of due process in deportation, and we tried to parse the legal significance of keeping one’s mouth shut under interrogation lights. Reinhart and Rogoff struck back, we took a subway ride through New York’s inequality gap, and George Packer gave voice to friends of the US trapped in Afghanistan after we leave. Finally, Noam Scheibler followed former Obama aides into the lobbying business and Dreher clarified why he doesn’t belong to the GOP as readers flooded the inbox in response to yesterday’s email from a would-be gay Republican.

In miscellanea, Adam Kirsch dove into the journal of Holocaust survivor Helga Weiss, we found out what’s keeping US soldiers awake at night, and Dishheads weighed in on one reader’s story of hydrocephalus. Melissa Holbrook Pierson described the hobby of ‘found photography,’ and we considered the message of Jackie Robinson’s new Hollywood treatment while George Soros received the Tom Sawyer treatment in the Headline of the Day. Patton Oswalt delivered a tour de force in fan-fic filibustering while six literary titans workshopped Moby Dick. We took in a strong commercial for gun legislation in the Cool Ad Watch, joined Iron and Wine for a light show in the wilderness in the MHB, and enjoyed a floral view in Washington, DC for the VFYW.

–B.J.

“I want to apologize. I think that should have been handled better,” – Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, after the Fox control room pulled the plug on the president’s angry Rose Garden speech about gun control after a few seconds, in order to talk about liberal media bias.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson collects vintage snapshots from people she has never met:

The genre of “found photography”—or, we might call it, inadvertent art—had a poignant moment in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Some of the thousands of lost family photos reworked by seawater and sludge, wearing a perversely gorgeous sorrow, were exhibited in the New York Times, where they landed a punishing blow: no more immediate, or bruising, statement on loss was ever hung on museum walls. But to their separated owners, seeing this distress to the image must have been like making a short visit to hell. The receiver changes the meaning, not to get all Reception Theory on you. An international group of technically savvy volunteers began Operation Photo Rescue (“Insurance Doesn’t Rescue Photos . . . But We Do”) after Hurricane Katrina, and they are now working with infinitesimal patience to digitally restore pictures nearly destroyed in the later disaster. Stuff, even houses, can be replaced (with enough money), but every photo records something that can ever exist only within its frame. People who lost everything say they want their pictures back most of all. That’s because they are the mausoleums of life’s minutes, and it is as sacrilegious to let the roof fall in on the documents that proved we were there, that we lived in exactly this form, as to neglect a loved one’s grave.

But when we are gone, who is there to care, really? I cart the boxes of my paper ephemera through the years, from house to house to house, and I make sure not to store them in the damp basement. Someone will want these someday, I half-consciously think, because to think otherwise is to imagine I don’t really matter.

(Photo: Family photos lie in the debris of a flood-damaged home on November 1, 2012 in the Ocean Breeze area of the Staten Island borough of New York City. By John Moore/Getty Images)

The US military is fighting it:

Since stimulants have failed to offer a biological substitute for sleep, the new watchword of sleep innovators is ‘efficiency’, which means in effect reducing the number of hours of sleep needed for full functionality. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the research arm of the US military – leads the way in squeezing a full night’s sleep into fewer hours, by forcing sleep the moment head meets pillow, and by concentrating that sleep into only the most restorative stages. Soldiers on active duty need to function at their cognitive and physiological best, even when they are getting only a few hours sleep in a 24-hour cycle. …

With military personnel in mind, [Advanced Brain Monitoring] has developed a mask called the Somneo Sleep Trainer that exploits one- or two-hour windows for strategic naps in mobile sleeping environments. Screening out ambient noise and visual distractions, the mask carries a heating element around the eyes, based on the finding that facial warming helps send people to sleep. It also carries a blue light that gradually brightens as your set alarm time approaches, suppressing the sleep hormone melatonin for a less groggy awakening.

Hard to put it better than the above image, via Greenwald, from the ACLU’s Kade Crockford. Yes, today is the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s signing of the UN Convention Against Torture. The Obama administration’s refusal to investigate or prosecute anyone in the US government for war crimes is a violation of that Convention.

What Obama and Holder have done (or rather not done) is illegal.

I just searched for any mention of the nonpartisan Constitution Project Report which found categorical proof of a systematic torture program under Bush and Cheney – without reservation. The authors included a rock-ribbed Republican like Asa Hutchinson. I searched National Review, the Weekly Standard and all of AEI, an organization that calls itself conservative while employing a key architect and defender of the torture program, Marc Thiessen.

Nothing. If any reader can find a conservative media outlet tackling the report, please let me know if I have missed anything.

Adam Kirsch marvels at the just-published diary of the concentration camp survivor, Helga Weiss. Kirsch writes that some “of the most heartbreaking writing in the book comes in Helga’s description of the slow decimation of her class, as first one Jewish child and then another gets selected for transportation”:

No one knows where they are going, or whether they will ever return: As each family is called, friends and relatives help them pack their belongings and cook food for a journey whose end none of them know. Helga’s best friend Eva is preoccupied with deciding which of her dolls to take with her: “Eva will carry the dolls themselves in the pocket of her coat, in their own sleeping bags and clothing with transport numbers. What if the handbag were to get lost? Then at least the dolls would be saved.”