Month: April 2013

What We Know

Earlier tonight, an MIT police officer was shot dead. Following that, there was a car-jacking. Then there were explosions and gunfire in Watertown, Massachusetts. On Monday, the Boston Marathon was bombed. An eye-witness is currently watching police with guns drawn in his own back garden in Watertown and describing a scene of utter chaos. One person is apparently in custody but another or more may be at large. These suspects are being called “armed and dangerous.” This is serious shit going down. And the helicopter is still in the air and Watertown residents are being told to stay inside. An entire town in curfew.

Here’s what we don’t know but might infer. I repeat: we do not know these things. But what are the odds these events are not connected? Tonight’s suspects come from the MIT campus, where they are desperate and armed enough to kill a policeman. And the pictures below of the suspects from the Marathon bombing are wearing preppy baseball caps. They also do not seem “dark-skinned to me”. But photos are very hard to read ethnically.

In other words, these appear to be student-age prepster-look-alikes with bombs and guns.

What is their motive? That we cannot yet infer.

The live-news feed is here. Stay tuned. The Dish doesn’t sleep.

What The Hell Is Happening Around Cambridge?

[Updates from 1.03 am to 1.25 am. Watch live local-news feed here.]

Screen Shot 2013-04-19 at 1.36.06 AM

(Screenshot via Matt Novak)

The Daily Wrap

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.

On Top Of Their Heads

Screen shot 2013-04-18 at 8.32.05 PMHere’s a photo of a baseball cap, worn by one of the Boston bombing suspects, as examined by Reddit from a photo submitted by a contributor. Could it be this one? Very preppy. The other photos of the dude – from the front – seem to confirm it. The second suspect is wearing what looks to be a Ralph Lauren Polo cap, with the “3” on the side clearly visible here. It’s a fascinating thread.

Photography’s Lost And Found

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 New York And New Jersey Continue To Recover From Superstorm Sandymust 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 War On Sleep

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.