To find the right words to talk about Beverly is to find the right words to talk about silence. Years separated the moment of Beverly’s death from the moment when Todd Meyers stood on her porch, stealing looks past the new tenants’s shoulders into her home. Ten years of silence. He hadn’t known she had died; nobody had called or …
Early on in All That Was Not Her, as he recounts the difficulties of writing about Beverly, there is a sentence that catches her eye: “I seek to write the negative without vandalizing it” (p. 10). Negative is one of her favorite words. It marks a condensed, indispensable, impossible conceptual space. But this time it is vandalize that gives …
Masks have long been a symbol of resistance movements around the world, especially in East Asia. As early as the 1960s, protestors in Japan began wearing masks during their demonstrations. Masks became a part of the uniform of the late 1960s protesters for causes such as the Vietnam War, the university system, and the evictions for Narita Airport.
It is …
This article is part of the following series: Foreign correspondents
Leçons d’un siècle de vie.
Morin, Edgar.
2022. Paris: Pluriel.
Edgar Morin is probably the most influential French sociologist that the English-speaking world has never acknowledged. He has more than twenty honorary degrees from universities that work mainly in French, Spanish or Italian and research centres named for him in Sicily and Peru, as well as in Paris. A special …
Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the wake of disasters, ranging from wildfires to war, bringing with them instruments to diagnose, measure, and treat victims. Feeding into neuropsychiatric research on the effects of trauma, epigenetic studies have established yet another …
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories.
On the laptop screen in my home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in a Zoom call, Ruth Behar turns on her camera. In the background appear the bookshelves of her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, …