Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 186

Not Again, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Officers stand in a mist of tear gas. Protected by masks. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/YS2IMxagEG

— FOX2now (@FOX2now) August 12, 2014

Dara Lind brings us up to date on yesterday’s developments in the Michael Brown case:

After Sunday night’s unrest, a protest and rally scheduled for 10am Monday morning was canceled, and the mayor of Ferguson has said that anyone who attempted to show up to the rally would be arrested. Regardless, people still turned up at police headquarters to protest. Police officers were there with riot gear. After about two hours, the police succeeded in getting the crowd to disperse and started making arrests.

On Monday night, protests continued. Groups gathered in the street, raising their hands in surrender and chanting “Don’t shoot” – it’s become the unofficial motto of the Ferguson protests. Police also attempted to disperse these protests, moving down W. Florissant, the main street in the neighborhood. This time, they used tear gas and explosives to clear crowds, and fired rubber bullets. One report indicates that police cocked their rifles at protesters. Police told protesters to “go home,” but several residents protested that they were trapped in cul-de-sacs while the main road was closed off. Police also threatened press with arrest if they didn’t leave the scene.

Ed Morrissey is hung up on the weekend’s rioting:

So far, it appears that no one died or got seriously injured during the riot, although that hasn’t been entirely confirmed yet. If so, consider that luck. Riots get very ugly very quickly, and usually include vendettas from old conflicts and new. That was the case in the LA riots of 1992 after the Rodney King verdict, which resulted in 53 deaths, more than two thousand injuries, and 11,000 arrests.

In the end, though, the LA riots did what the Ferguson riot did last night — damage the community that had the grievance in the first place. Riots are about rage and insanity, not justice or accountability, and it drives people away rather than heal, regardless of whether the underlying cause is just or not. It destroys investment, usually in areas which already suffer from a lack of investment in the first place, and mires the area even deeper into poverty and dysfunction. It’s senseless and harms the people that were allegedly victimized in the first place.

But Jia Tolentino is more disturbed by the authorities’ response:

The chief of the St. Louis County Police Force “ask[s] the public to be reasonable” in this difficult time. The police, in the meantime, are dealing with looting and considerable unrest, but all accounts point to them not being reasonable.

Mychal Denzel Smith is frustrated:

Rioting/looting (what some would call rebellion) may not provide answers or justice. But what to do with the anger in the meantime? We are told to stay calm, but calm has not delivered justice either. Do we wait for the FBI to investigate? I guess, but what to do in the meantime, as the images coming from Ferguson echo Watts in 1965? We’re told not to tear up our own communities, when time and time again we’re reminded that they don’t belong to us. Deaths like Michael Brown’s tell us we don’t belong here. What, then?

Counting the bodies is draining. With every black life we lose, we end up saying the same things. We plead for our humanity to be recognized. We pray for the lives of our young people. We remind everyone of our history. And then another black person dies.

Amy Davidson weighs in on the whole sad affair:

Michael Brown was black and tall; was it his body that the police officer thought was dangerous enough? Perhaps it was enough for the officer that he lived on a certain block in a certain neighborhood; shooting down the street, after all, exhibits a certain lack of concern about anyone else who might be walking by. That sort of calculus raises questions about an entire community’s rights. One way or the other, this happens too often to young men who look like Brown, or like Trayvon Martin, or, as President Obama once put it, like a son he might have had.

Arming The Kurds, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Spencer Ackerman examines the logic behind the Obama administration’s decision to arm Iraq’s Kurds:

The idea of arming the Kurds has been the subject of weeks of internal deliberation and official silence by president Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers. It is a fateful step in Iraq’s current crisis, one that risks facilitating the long-term disintegration of Iraq. Several administrations over decades have refrained from arming the peshmerga due to concerns about reprisals from Saddam Hussein and his successors. US officials have demurred for days when asked about the deliberations. It provides an opportunity for Obama to use a proxy for confronting Isis on the ground – a step Obama has said he is unwilling to take with US forces – which defense analysts consider the only way to dislodge Isis from territory in north and central Iraq the group has seized since June. …

The danger is that arming the peshmerga will facilitate a permanent fragmentation of Iraq, something the Kurds consider a national aspiration.

Several disputed and multi-ethnic cities in northern Iraq complicate any peaceful cleavage, as do major oil holdings in both Kurdish and contested territory. The Peshmerga used the June disintegration of Iraqi army forces running from Isis as an opportunity to seize disputed areas like oil-rich Kirkuk.

While ISIS’s offensive across northern Iraq has shattered the conventional wisdom of the peshmerga as an unbeatable fighting force, the Kurdish fighters’ recent losses are not quite their fault, either:

Michael Knights, the Lafer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an expert on the military and security affairs of Iraq, dismissed the new conventional wisdom that the Peshmerga have caved. “I wouldn’t put it that way,” he said. “The premise is slightly off. It’s a very easy sell to report it that way. Nothing really crumbled quickly. There’s been nonstop fighting … for a number of weeks. They have been in combat with [the Islamic State] for two to three weeks. This has been a breakpoint.” For instance, from Aug. 1 to 3, the Islamic State launched an offensive in Iraq’s western Nineveh province that forced the Peshmerga to retreat. At the same time, the Peshmerga was fighting the militants for the cities of Jalula and Saadiya in Diyala province — areas that are “very difficult to defend,” according to Knights, stretching forces thin.

In fact, Mohammed Salih suggests, the Kurds are itching to make a comeback with American help:

Abdullah and other Kurdish commanders say that despite recent defeats, they can stop the Islamic State. The successful campaign to take back Makhmour and Gwer may signal that Kurds are able to push the militants back. The Peshmerga are especially counting on U.S. assistance these days. Their morale got a boost after U.S. F/A-18 aircraft bombed Islamic State positions on Friday, Aug. 8. Repeated U.S. airstrikes since have targeted Islamic State positions and convoys around Erbil and in western Nineveh. In parallel, Kurds have been strengthening their positions, and Kurdish reinforcements are coming in from across the region to help.

Peshmerga commanders say they have been outgunned in recent weeks. The Peshmerga have not been in a true battle since helping fight Saddam Hussein’s army during the U.S. invasion in 2003. Even then, most of the fight was carried out from the air by U.S. warplanes and missiles. The Islamic State’s crack fighting force, on the other hand, has been honing its skills over the past two years in Syria and Iraq. Around 150 Peshmerga troops have been killed and 500 others wounded in the latest fighting, according to Kurdish government statistics.

A bit awkward for the US, though, is that some of those “reinforcements … from across the region” are from Turkey’s outlawed PKK:

This initiative doesn’t just involve the pesh merga affiliated with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, but a whole constellation of Kurdish units drawn from Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. One of the main organizations in the counteroffensive against the Islamic State is the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its acronym, PKK. Because of its history of militancy and violence in Turkey, it is still recognized by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization.

That reality echoes awkwardly with the present. Last week, as my colleague Loveday Morris reported, the PKK called for collaboration between an alphabet soup of oft-fractious Kurdish factions. One of the main outfits safeguarding Yazidi escape routes into Syria and retrieving the refugees at the border is the YPG, the armed wing of the Syrian Kurdish PYD party, which is itself an offshoot of the PKK. The YPG has fought both Islamist rebels in Syria, as well as the forces of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Portraits of Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed founder of the PKK and a hero to many Kurdish nationalists, are ubiquitous in YPG camps, reports Al-Monitor.

Playing the Prostitution Shame Game, With a Little Help From Hyperbole and Fear

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Comedian Jim Norton admits that he “cannot even fathom a guess as to how much money” he has spent on paid sex in the past few decades. He isn’t ashamed of his habit, and he doesn’t think other johns should be either. But he does worry that the criminal status of sex work invites violence:

By keeping prostitution illegal because we find it “morally objectionable,” we allow (or, more accurately, you allow) sex workers to constantly be put into dangerous situations. Studies have shown that rapes and STDs dropped drastically between 2003 and 2009 in Rhode Island after the state accidentally legalized it. The American Journal of Epidemiology showed that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 50 times higher than the next most dangerous job for a woman, working in a liquor store. You don’t need a Masters in sociology to understand it would be much safer for sex workers if they were permitted to work in places that provided adequate security. Legalizing prostitution would also alleviate the fear a sex worker may have about reporting the abusive behavior of a john out of fear of arrest.

…. By keeping prostitution illegal and demonizing all of its parties, we (you) are empowering pimps and human traffickers and anyone else who wants to victimize sex workers because they feel helpless under the law.

These are all arguments I make frequently (as do organizations like Amnesty International, the United Nations Development Programme, and Open Society Foundations). Criminalizing consensual sex between adults not only harms the sex workers and johns engaged in it but also the actual victims of sex trafficking, from whom resources are being diverted in order to conduct large, interstate stings on men like Norton. Dan Savage recently criticized such tactics, in response to an organization called Seattle Against Slavery and its Men’s March to End Demand:

The Men’s March organizers said in an e-mail that they hoped to get 75 men (and women and families) at the Men’s March to End Demand. But even if 75,000 men (and women and families) marched tomorrow—even if 750,000 men, women, and families marched—men (and some women) will continue to buy for sex from women (and some men). There have always been sex workers and there always will be sex workers. Sex workers have always had clients and they always will. Marching to “end the demand” for sex work is like marching to end the demand for illegal drugs. Marchers may burn a few calories, and they may leave feeling as if they’ve done something, but people will go right on paying for sex and using drugs.

Seattle Against Slavery subscribes to the popular, delusional conception that all prostitution is “sex trafficking.” This delusion was recently promulgated by journalist Charlotte Alter in response to Norton’s anti- john-shaming essay. After telling Norton and everyone else they “should be ashamed” to pay for sex—after all, men aren’t “entitled to sex, but women are entitled to human dignity”—Alter asserts:

No amount of rationalization can get around the basic principle of market economics: if people like you didn’t buy girls, they wouldn’t be sold, and if they couldn’t be sold, they wouldn’t be trafficked and abused.

If Norton had said he pays girls for sex, I could see Alter’s point. But he didn’t. Norton wrote about paying for consensual sex with adult women working in the sex industry. Alter responded by accusing him of raping abused girls.

This is a popular tactic from the anti-sex work crowd. It can be hard to convince Americans, with their strong support of individual liberties, that the whys and hows of private adult sex is a proper matter of state concern. But if you can tie adult prostitution to the criminal trafficking of teens and children, more people’s ears start to perk up. And Alter tries her darndest, letting unsubstantiated allegations and spurious statistics fly:

Did you ever consider, Jim, whether these girls … might have slept with you only because they would get beaten if they didn’t make a certain amount of money that night. And if you thought they enjoyed it, they were probably faking, because that’s exactly what you pay them to do. Sure, some woman do choose this line of work, and sex-workers unions argue that prostitution can be a freely made choice, but that’s not the case for the vast majority: U.S. State Department estimates that 80% of the 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders every year are trafficked for sex.

This statistic is false. To substantiate it, Alter links not to actual State Department statistics but to a page from the advocacy organization Half the Sky—and even that doesn’t say what Alter says it does:

The U.S. State Department … estimates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Eighty percent of those trafficked are women and girls, mostly for sexual exploitation.

Half the Sky doesn’t provide any links or citations to back up these claims, either. According to a 2014 report from the State Department, however, only 44,758 victims of any sort of human trafficking were identified worldwide in 2013. Obviously not all or even most of those who are trafficked are identified by global governments, but I do wonder how we leap from less than 50,000 identified victims to an annual estimate of 600,000 and 800,000 victims, not including those who don’t cross country lines.

Of the identified victims, there were people who had been sold into prostitution, domestic labor, farm labor, military subscription, and a number of sectors. While the state department data doesn’t break it down, the International Labor Organization estimates that about 3 times as many people are trafficked into labor as are trafficked into the sex trade, and less if you include those trafficked by state or rebel groups and not just private individuals or enterprises. Women and girls make up a little more than half of total human trafficking victims.

Perhaps Half the Sky’s claim that trafficking is mostly girls and women being sexually exploited comes from the Bureau of Justice, which says that 80 percent of trafficking victims identified by U.S. federal investigations in 2008-2010 were sex trafficking victims. But it would be dangerous to assume the amount identified here reflects the trafficking population as a whole, since U.S. law enforcement puts much more effort into fighting the sex trade (especially these days) than it does cracking down on, say, forced domestic labor.

People like Alter ignore non-sexual trafficking victims in service of their anti-prostitution agenda, then have the audacity to question the motives of men like Norton who want to decriminalize sex work. Writes Alter:

Norton claims that legalizing prostitution would help solve (violence against sex workers), but what he really means is that it would be easier for him to buy sex without his pesky conscience getting in the way of his peskier penis. Because even though there are valid arguments for the legalization of prostitution, I’m finding it hard to believe that Norton really has the best interests of sex workers in mind.

While it’s neat that Alter thinks she can read minds, I guess, there’s nothing in Norton’s text to support her interpretation. He states that he feels no shame about paying for sex, doesn’t think anyone should feel ashamed about it, does not feel bothered by its illegality, and would not buy more sex if it was legal. I don’t see why we have any reason to think that Norton’s stated reason—making the whole business safer, especially for sex workers themselves—is suspect. That is unless, like Allen, you can’t conceive of a world in which anyone could purchase sexual services from someone and still respect their humanity.

(Photo: A demonstrator holds a placard reading ‘yes to the freedom to prostitute oneself’ on November 29, 2013 in Paris during a protest against a bill that would punish clients of prostitutes. By Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images)

Clinton Out-Hawks Obama

by Dish Staff

How Jeffrey Goldberg characterizes his recent interview with Hillary Clinton:

President Obama has long-ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

But Andrew Sprung disagrees with Goldberg’s framing:

I’ve seen more than one tweet this morning to the effect that Hillary Clinton “threw Obama under an ISIS-driven Humvee” in a long, probing, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. I think that’s a wrong impression created by Goldberg’s introductory overview, which overstates her actual and implied criticisms of Obama.

It’s no secret that Clinton advocated for early U.S. support of allegedly moderate factions in the Syrian opposition. And it’s necessary and prudent for Hillary to distance herself from Obama, or position herself to do so, in that a) she genuinely is more interventionist, and b) the world could blow up on Obama and doom her chances if she’s seen as a continuation. But it’s also in Hillary’s DNA to hedge, both from a desire to cover both sides and an ability to see complexity (except with regard to Israel, to which she pandered without inhibition). And in at least three instances, Goldberg emphasized just one side of her equation.

Francis Wilkinson seconds Sprung:

The skill and elasticity of her rhetoric was impressive. She spoke at length, and seemingly without restraint, yet it’s hard to find specific acts of the Obama administration that she has clearly renounced or endorsed, or firm positions of her own to which she irrevocably committed. … Clinton drew a clear distinction with Obama on Syria, pointing out that she had wanted more vigorous support for the non-jihadists among the Syrian opposition. But she made no claim that her preferred approach would have succeeded. She also compared herself very favorably with her successor, John Kerry, in moving Israeli and Palestinian leaders toward compromise, casting Kerry’s subsequent efforts in a diminished light. But much of Clinton’s foreign policy analysis fell under the rubric of “time will tell.”

Cillizza sees Clinton’s comments as baldy political:

Clinton wants people to remember she never always agreed with Obama. One of the challenges Clinton will face in 2016 — although not the biggest challenge — is her association with Obama, particularly on foreign policy. (She was, after all, the top diplomat in the Obama Administration for his first term.) What Clinton does not want to do, however, is be forced to own every decision the President made — especially those that she disagreed with. On Afghanistan, Clinton — along with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — advocated for putting more troops in the country. On Libya , Clinton was a lead voice making the case for a military intervention to topple Muammar Gaddafi. And, in the interview with Goldberg, Clinton calls the U.S.’s decision to not actively involve itself in the early days of the uprising in Syria a “failure”. There will be plenty on the foreign policy front that Clinton will have to own — “pushing the reset button” with Russia, anyone? — but she also wants to make very clear that had she been president, our foreign policy might have looked very different over the past six years.

Matt K. Lewis calls out-hawking Obama politically brilliant but his argument is relatively flimsy:

Pundits love to say that people vote their pocketbooks, not foreign policy. Well, what Clinton is doing here transcends foreign policy. It’s about restoring America’s swagger. And I think there’s a real hunger for this.

Larison more convincingly argues that Clinton’s hawkishness will backfire:

There are many things one could call Clinton’s recent foreign policy remarks in this Goldberg interview, but politically savvy or brilliant is *not* one of them. The foreign policy she outlined in the interview is one that would replicate all of Obama’s major errors (e.g., intervention in Libya, arming foreign rebels, etc.) while expanding on and adding to them. She is clearly currying favor with foreign policy analysts and pundits that already think Obama has been too passive on Syria, Ukraine, etc., and she is doing that by reciting many of their unpersuasive arguments.

Clinton has “brilliantly” identified herself as the hawk that she has always been, which puts her sharply at odds with most people in her own party and most Americans of all political affiliations. That’s not triangulation at all.

Dougherty fears the worst:

Clinton’s strategy of trying to say that she would have embraced Obama’s foreign policy — But harder! And bigger! — amounts to admitting she would double down on failures, engage in drive-by wars, and get America stuck in confusing entanglements with gun-wielding losers and child-beheaders. Will some Democrat with an ounce of sense speak up and try to defeat Clinton before we get George W. Bush’s third term?

Josh Marshall thinks thinks Hillary is playing a dangerous game:

[T]here’s an element of Hillary’s strategic distancing I’ve not seen widely mentioned. President Obama is not popular at the moment. His popularity is at best in the low 40s. But among the people who choose Democratic nominees – that is, partisan Democrats – he remains quite popular. And even for many Democrats who feel disappointed, let down or just worn out by the whole six year journey, President Obama represents something that transcends how they may feel about him at just this moment.

Quite apart from the pros and cons of particular foreign policy strategies, I believe the great majority of partisan Democrats feel protective of the President. So it’s a delicate, perilous thing to criticize him so publicly, particularly at a politically vulnerable moment, especially when the nature of the criticism mirrors that of many of the President’s most dogged and aggrieved foes.

And, lastly, looking beyond Clinton’s rhetoric, Marc Lynch pushes back on Clinton’s suggestion that we should have armed Syria’s rebels. Among his reasons for rejecting that step:

The idea that these rebel groups could be vetted for moderation and entrusted with advanced weaponry made absolutely no sense given the realities of the conflict in Syria. These local groups frequently shifted sides and formed alliances of convenience as needed. As MIT’s Fotini Christia has documented in cases from Afghanistan to Bosnia, and the University of Virginia’s Jonah Shulhofer-Wohl has detailed in Syria, rebel groups that lack a legitimate and effective over-arching institutional structure almost always display these kinds of rapidly shifting alliances and “blue on blue” violence. A “moderate, vetted opposition” means little when alliances are this fluid and organizational structures so weak.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #216

by Chris Bodenner

After more than four years running the VFYW Contest (a feature increasingly innovated by Chas, aka Special Teams), I thought I would finally throw my own view into the ring. A reader writes:

Somewhere in Barcelona. I had a very similar view from a hotel there once.

Another:

Paraguay, because of “Chacarita” on the bus. (Chacarita is a barrio, or neighborhood, in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay.)

Another asks, “How about Chacarita, Costa Rica?” Another stands by his principles:

SW Rome. I don’t believe in researching these!

Another notices a key detail:

Winter clothing and the portable propane patio heater tell us we are looking at the Southern Hemisphere.

Another gets the right city:

Unless I’m missing something, this one had a surprisingly HUGE giveaway: the graphics on the bus – Chacaritas – clearly place the photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’m putting it in the Colegiales neighborhood on Calle Maure, but being an underachiever with three kids in tow to boot, I’ll leave it to another Dishhead to take this one home!

Another shares a great memento:

A few years ago, my family went on a vacation to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday in Buenos Aires, the location of this week’s VFYW. This photo transported me back on Sunday morning when I saw it, with its architecture, foliage and of course, the bus. While there, one souvenir I purchased was a small coffee table book, El Libro de los Colectivos, a book celebrating the unique styles and culture of the city’s buses:

The colectivo 39, without a doubt, is the major clue in his week’s photo (although according to the book, number 39 seems have have changed its look since this book came out). Looks like it used to have a red and black color scheme, different than today’s mud and cola colors. Both still have gold accents.

Another goes for the right neighborhood:

After hoping that someday there might be a VFYW pic with a clue so obvious that it might as well have been written on the broad side of a bus, there it was, right in front of me. But I’m still uncertain. I’ll go with the neighborhood of Chacarita in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More specifically, a view from the Hotel Torre at the corner of Avenues Corrientes and Olleros. Late afternoon Southern Hemisphere fall shadows agree with that intersection’s orientation, but there is still something not quite right with the hotel’s location at that corner. But I will stand firmly in quicksand with my guess.

Another adds, “The famous Chacarita Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Argentina with many notable interments.” Another reader:

Gut feeling says “Buenos Aires.” I was there a couple of years ago and this looks like the neighborhoods I walked through. I won’t go for the intersection (let alone the exact window), but let’s say it’s in the Recoleta neighborhood, near the cemetery where Eva Peron is entombed.

Another notices a detail no one else did:

The jacaranda trees and architecture told me it was Buenos Aires, probably the Palermo neighborhood, before I even tracked down the bus that features so prominently in the photo.

Palermo it is. Another reader:

Welp, everyone is going to get this week’s window location, I think. Googling “chacarita 39″ brings up this route map for the bus in the picture as the very first hit:

If I were motivated to find the exact window, I’d just take that map and – noting that the bus is turning right – find all the right turns on the route and zoom in on them. But I’m not, because thinking of Buenos Aires reminds me of my favorite author, the master Jorge Luis Borges (who was born there), and I find a parallel between the VFYW contest and his tale of the Zahir: that thing that possesses the power to induce an overwhelming obsession in those who see it, slowly consuming them until they lose all sense of reality, until finally “(they) will have to be fed and dressed, (they) will not know whether it is morning or night, (they) will not know who (they were).”

Many are the Saturdays that I have spent long hours seeking out the location of a fascinating View window. Is it possible that this contest has become my Zahir?

Another moves along:

If you think I’m going to follow the 39 Chacarita bus line through it’s entire route looking for this corner, you’re nuts.

Another gives it a shot:

I’m not super familiar with Buenos Aires, but based on the fact that the bus is turning right and on the tree-lined street, I’m guessing Avenida Santa Fe in the (trendy!) Palermo district, taken at the intersection of Santa Fe and Vidt. From a 5th-floor window in the building on the northeast side of the street.

Another tried another tool:

So, I’ve chased every turn the #39 Chacarita bus makes as it winds through the streets of Buenos Aires and failed miserably. Even tried searching through the photos of each hotel listed on the route in the Time Out guide. I’m exhausted and my head hurts!

Chas helped me plot many of the other guesses:

Another scratches his head:

I thought the geometry of this intersection was peculiar. There were three vehicles in motion at this intersection. The photo shows that the vehicles are traveling on a one way street. The vehicle to the right (in the photo – it is left in relation to the other vehicles in the real world) is making a left-hand turn, while the bus and the car next to it are going straight through the intersection. To the left are parked cars facing the opposite direction from the car turning left, which indicates that this street might be two ways.

Another nails the right intersection:

First-time entrant, long time astonished observer here. I think this was taken from the fifth-floor window (fourth-floor in European counting, i.e. ground+4) of the building on the corner of Mario Bravo and Soler in Buenos Aires (3600 Soler? Can’t figure out an exact address), on the five-way intersection of Soler, Honduras, Mario Bravo, and Coronel Diaz.

Another provides a visual of the five-way:

The #39 bus to Chacarita! Google search for “Chacarita” led me to Buenos Aires, and from there I found a detailed route map of the #39. So I just have to use Street View to check out all the intersections on the route where the #39 bus turns, right? Wrong – there’s no Street View for Buenos Aires yet. But Google Earth is a good enough substitute, and it led me to this intersection:

The photo looks like it was taken from the triangular building on the south side of Soler, and the photo is catching the bus turning onto Soler from Av Coronel Diaz. I couldn’t find the address for the building where the photo was taken, so I assume it’s residential – I’m guessing the window is on the 6th floor of the building.

Another has a great photo of that triangular building:

My city! Finally! At first sight, it looked like the snobbish Palermo neighborhood. With the 39 line bus clue, and the street that changes its direction (Soler Street), it was a piece of cake to deduce the exact corner. I know this city better than my palm. It’s a similar size to NYC, and it does have a somewhat similar vibe, but it has fewer green spaces (in that sense, it is the worst in Latin America) and a worse public transport system. It’s a worse city than New York, but I love it.

This was the building in which the picture was taken, and I’m guessing the fifth floor:

Another walks us through:

The two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back of this week’s contest:

1. Easily spot Chacarita 39 on bus in picture… Yay!

2. Note that this damn bus line in Buenos Aires runs through pretty big portion of the city… Grrr

3. Easily find a block-by-block bus route on a satellite image-enabled map… Yay!

4. Waste precious time trying to find a spot on the route where the bus turns sharply right… Grr

5. Using both the bus line website and Googlemaps, locate the slight turn (a right turn!) on from Avenida Coronel Diaz, across Soler, onto Honduras that appears to fit the bill… Yay!

6. Realize that Google Streetview is not avialable in Buenos Aires… WTF?!

My best guess is that the picture was taken from an apartment building with the address “De la Carcova 3501-3599″ in the Palermo section of Buenos Aires. The view looks due north from the fifth floor across Soler towards Avenida Coronel Diaz.

One of the best visual entries:

Another didn’t get that far:

Looks like a South American city. Somewhere I’ve been. Best guess: Buenos Aires. It may be winter there, but it’s a gorgeous summer day here, so I’m done. (I’ll leave finding the details and winning the book to someone else.) Gonna go out and enjoy myself in Central Park, in that wonderful city that you hate so much and that apparently makes so many people so miserable.

Rest assured there won’t be any gratuitous NYC bashing while Andrew is away this month. And by the way, the winters down in Buenos Aires are pretty gorgeous too; 65-degree sunny days are common. How a reader describes it:

It’s a strange place: Warm as hell but resembling a German city at times.

Another:

It turns out it’s actually more frustrating when you know the city! I have spent a lot time in Buenos Aires so I knew immediately. I suspect I’ve even taken the Line 39 Chacarita Bus. If I were a more patient individual I could trace the route of the bus but I’m not that patient. Anyway, I’m guessing somewhere in the Palermo neighborhood. I await the efforts of a more obsessive person to identify the exact corner, and window.

Another obsessive:

Another notes:

Riding those buses years ago was one of my highlights of living there. Drivers would “drive,” shift gears, smoke, talk to their girlfriends (seated behind or next to them), give tickets, make change, yell at passengers, debate passengers, and, usually, avoid minor fender benders with other vehicles and pedestrians.

Another also knows the area:

The #39 bus to Chacarita (a fabulous neighborhood where many gays have moved since the gentrification of Palermo) veers right at this intersection onto Calle Honduras. Hope I’m right! And I hope the “rational default” doesn’t further destabilize an already highly volatile economic / employment situation in Argentina.

Another has fond memories of the city:

I spent six months studying in Buenos Aires while I was in college and lived in the Palermo neighborhood with a lovely old couple, and I woke up to a similar more often than not. After I got married last year, I traveled there on my honeymoon where I tried to relive some of the magic of that city. Now, the number 39 route (which I did ride on occasion) goes through several neighborhoods, but the feeling on the street reminds me of Palermo. Thanks for reminding me once again of this great place.

Another:

It’s a tremendous coincidence that you selected this precise location, since it not only inspired great nostalgia in me as a former resident of Buenos Aires, but in fact the lower-right corner of the photo contains a view of Café Nostalgia, located at the corner of Av. Coronel Díaz and Soler in the neighborhood of Palermo.

My nostalgia was further enhanced by the fact that I used to live about ten blocks away, on the border of Palermo and Recoleta, and that I used to ride that very bus (the 39 Line to Chacarita) with great frequency while attending classes in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires.

Great choice – thanks for the wonderful memory!

Another adds, “Café-Bar Nostalgia is described here as ‘a space in which you can revel in the antiquated whilst observing the modern,’ complete with a crowd-pleasing ‘barrelful of monkey nuts’ – yum!” … meaning a barrel of peanuts from which they serve you a bowl at your table. Another reader:

The neighborhood sounds interesting and perhaps a bit ritzy. A review of the restaurant across the street gushes about the $35-$40 main courses and the excellent people watching.

That review was written in January 2010, and prices at Cafe Nostalgia are actually much lower now. I’ve had many amazing steak dinners there with another person, sharing a bottle of wine, and I’ve rarely spent more than $50 USD. Update from a reader:

By the way, if you want a fancy (somewhat expensive by BA standards) and amazing meal, try Paraje Arevalo. We went late last year and loved it.

Just the kind of recommendation I was hoping to get by posting my view this week. And I’m finally getting a two-week vacation this month, after many years without a break from the Dish longer than a week, so keep the recommendations coming! My favorite entry this week:

I recognized Bs As right away – same as I did last time you had this city: there’s something so distinct of its aesthetic. I used to to live there back in ’09-’10. I googled the bus line and that confirmed it (as recently as 2010 there was no website like that and you had to carry around a city-issued byzantine pocket-guide). Out of the path on that route it felt like the neighborhood of Almagro to me.

I started looking along “Honduras” and when I cam across the corner of Colonel Diaz I saw “Cafe Nostalgia” pop up. Back in Bs As I worked part-time as a photographer for The Argentina Independent, a small English language newspaper. I’d photographed Cafe Nostalgia for them as part of a project on the then-54 Bares Notables (bars and cafes with a sort of historical landmark status from the city). Two of my photos [seen above and below] still come up as some of the first google image results for “Cafe Nostalgia.“

I went back and looked through the rest of that roll (all film) and even though there wasn’t any smoking gun pic, I do think that that green awning in the bottom right is Cafe Nostalgia. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking for this whole coincidence to be the case, but I’ll make my guess for that corner: Universidad de Palermo – Ingenieria, Mario Bravo 1300, Almagro, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Let’s say 4th floor.

Truly an amazing coincidence that the photographer is a Dish reader, since his photos were widely cited by other players this week. Another:

So easy!!! Since this is my hometown :) The giveaway was the bus. The “39”. Anybody who has ever visited BA knows that the city is crowded with buses everywhere, each with their different numbers and their distinctive colors. The 39 passes by my old school (University of Buenos Aires) and of course I took it many times to go places in the city. The “Chacarita” written in the top of the bus signifies the last stop, one of the biggest cemeteries in the city. So I’m guessing that you will get tons of correct answers this week. I can’t give you the exact window but it doesn’t matter, it was definitely nice to see my city in the contest this week, I really miss it. “Mi Buenos Aires querido”.

Another also reflects:

Identifying the city was easy. I went on holiday to Buenos Aires with friends in 2008, and I snapped a street scene in the containing buses with similar numbering, attached here, which helped me identify this photo location. The distinctive multi-story European architecture and signs in Castilian Spanish were also good clues.

Another wants to go:

I came across the El Ateneo book store while googling along the route 39 bus line and then stopped searching as I didn’t want it to be anyplace else. Beautiful. Thanks for adding another location to the bucket list!

Another goes for the right window:

More specifically, it’s the building located at -34.594237, -58.414353. The view is looking roughly due north (Chini will probably tell you it’s looking N at 2.278 degrees or some shit). And I’m guessing the window is on the sixth floor, maybe the seventh. No idea what the room number is. The building is located in the triangle between Mario Bravo, Soler and De la Carcova streets. It took me about 20 minutes to find the building. Then I spent the next three hours trying to figure out something about the building. Nada. I’m guessing it’s an apartment building since there seems to be a bunch of rentals nearby. You can always check out the nearby Lovers and Fuckers, if you’re in the neighborhood.

After having wasted more than a few Saturday afternoons trying to figure out the VFYW contest, I’ve now decided that if I can’t figure out a lead within 1-2 minutes, then I have to get on my life. Sometimes I’ve been able to get the city, but not the building. Other times, I have a gut feeling that I’ve been to the town or city in the picture, but can’t quite figure it out. I nailed #157, but so did everybody else. #177 was especially frustrating since it looked so familiar, I’d recently been on vacation there and had gone to college nearby.

When I looked at this VFYW pic, my immediate reaction was “WTF?”, like usual. But then I noticed the bus and realized that it offered a ton of clues. Sure enough, it lead me to this building.

(The above image is actually from a different reader.) Another suspects that “Doug Chini is fuming with boredom.” Let’s see:

To steal a line from Whittier, “it might have been.” If your viewer had waited a few seconds longer to take this week’s image just finding the right city would have been a battle, much less the exact spot. But they didn’t, and that #39 bus passing through center frame means that the Dish staff is gonna be buried under a landslide of responses.

This week’s view comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The picture was taken from roughly the fifth floor of a building on the 3500 block of Esquinas Soler and looks almost due north along a heading of 348.3 degrees. Bird’s eye and overhead views are attached along with a shot of the video game store just below your viewer’s window:

Another great entry:

This one gave my roommate and me a good, solid two hours of bonding time. You usually don’t give as many hints as you did here! A full bus number and name, that’s something. He’s been to Argentina, so he noticed the architecture right away, too. From there, it was scouring the bus line for an intersection where the 39 takes a right from a one-way street onto a two-way street. It’s where Av Coronel Diaz meets Soler and Honduras here. The 3500 block of Soler. We haven’t had this much fun together since we used to smoke pot and play frisbee in the park, thank you!

About 95% of the contestants this week correctly answered Buenos Aires, and dozens guessed the right floor in the triangle building at 3594 Soler, where I’m living for two months while Dishing full-time. So picking a winner was tough this week. But the prize goes to one of our favorite new contestants this year, better known as the GIF guy, for his inimitable entry:

The GIF guy, like Chini, has become such a great staple of the window contest that I asked permission to use his real name (since the Dish has a default anonymity policy of course). So welcome Blake Fall-Conroy to the pantheon of the VFYWC. Little surprise that Blake is an artist. Another creative reader wraps up this week’s contest with a short story:

The Chacarita 39

The late afternoon light was fading along Soler street, but enough of it filtered in to softly illuminate the small apartment with the dingy windows on the 6th floor. The low hum of traffic and street chatter drifted up from below and a few birds whistled loudly to each other.

Fernando’s eyes blinked open. What time was it?

He glanced over at the clock by the bed. The numbers were red and blurry, but he could make out 7:32. That couldn’t be right. Had he really slept for 3 hours?

He sat up panicked and looked down at his clothes. He was still wearing the wrinkled khakis and blue t-shirt that he had on in his engineering class that morning. The classes at Palermo were always long and boring and he was still hung over from Chasco’s party. He thought he could get a short nap in before meeting Maricela at the café across the street.

“I’ll give you one last chance,” she had said, sipping her Torrontés, her mischievous eyes sparkling from the blue party lights. “Meet me at six at Nostalgia and we’ll talk about it.” He had grinned stupidly at her as she left the party, and she had smiled back.

Fernando put his head in his hands. How had he let himself sleep through it? Would she still be there?

The answer came from the low rumble of a diesel bus overtaking the clatter of conversations from the café patio. He ran to the window and peered down at the intersection. Through the trees he could see the Chacarita 39 – Maricela’s bus – pulling out from in front of the café. He was too late. He grabbed his phone and snapped a picture as it turned onto Honduras street. The bus faded out of his view, taking Maricela across Buenos Aires and out of his life.

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

It’s a particularly dire moment in the world to take a vacation. But when recently would have been a better one? So I’m sticking to plans and taking a real break from the blog this August. It’s been an exhilarating but utterly draining couple of years and I need a real break from the grid’s persistent pounding to get some balance and perspective and rest. I have a couple of chores to finish – including a transcript of a phone-call debate with Sam Harris over Israel-Palestine which we’ll be posting soon – but thereafter, I won’t be blogging until after the weekend after Labor Day. I hope you’ll indulge me this time away. It’s hard to explain exactly how intensely draining blogging every day for months on end can be. And I’m now 51. Time, I’ve decided, to take a little better care of myself – so I can do this job without the constant tinge of exhaustion and stress.

But happily, the Dish now has a team more than capable of taking over when I’m gone. And this summer break, we’re trying a slightly new formula for guest-blogging and by-lines. All the posts that are products of our relentless aggregation and curation of the best of the web will be by-lined “by Dish Staff”. Only much longer posts will get bylines – and each week, one Dish staffer and one outside guest-writer will be tasked with the bigger, opinion-heavy posts that I usually tackle. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and this is a time when mine don’t matter here. So to kick off, we have Elizabeth Nolan Brown and our own Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Next week Freddie deBoer will be joining us. The week after that Bill McKibben and his wife Sue Halpern will stop by. And our final week will be hosted by Alex Pareene. It’s quite a line-up. So stay tuned as Dish staffers get to opine without my oversight, and as guests get to stir shit up. I’ve no doubt the news will also give the staff a huge amount to work with.

Speaking of whom, I just wanted to thank my editorial colleagues – Chris and Patrick, Jessie, Matt and Chas, Tracy and Jonah, Alice and Phoebe, for creating this concoction with me from scratch every day month after month. They are the backbone of the Dish, the reason it still exists, and a daily inspiration – both as bloggers and as human beings. And also a thanks to you, for subscribing in such numbers, for keeping me on my toes, and for adding so much insight and knowledge and wit and honesty to our rambling conversation. I look back on what we’ve created this past year and a half and am amazed.

Our Iraq coverage over the weekend is here, here, and here.

The most popular post remained The Last And First Temptation Of Israel, followed by Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel.

Many of our recent posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 24 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. A reader writes:

I have finally joined your group of merry subscribers. I have been reading The Dish for a while, and realized that it was past time to put my $19.99 where my intellect was. I learn a great deal from what you and your team write, as well as from the pieces to which you link. The perspicacity of your readers is an additional draw – and the fact that you give them a platform, even when (especially when?) they wholeheartedly disagree with you.

The moral clarity of your voice on Israel and Gaza has been particularly welcome, as well as your thunderous pronouncements on the sins of the Church, like some (bearded!) prophet of old. What I particularly appreciate about The Dish is that it is removed from the Manichean discourse that permeates our political discourse. Do I always agree with you? Nope – where would be the fun in that? But I am always challenged to think. What more could one ask?

I bring the following as a housewarming gift:

Caption from the Paris Review:

If you had asked me two days ago if there existed any Catholic-themed YouTube video stranger than the one where G. K. Chesterton battles a cartoonishly evil Nietzsche, I would have said, “Of course not.” But that was before I saw this group of French feminists in beards paying tribute to Saint Wilgefortis. Wilgefortis is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as “a fabulous female saint … her attributes are listed as “bearded woman; depicted crucified, often shown with a small fiddler at her feet, and with one shoe off.” Considered a “pious fiction”—that is, a sort of unofficial folktale—she enjoyed popularity throughout Europe.

Good luck with The Dish. I look forward to being part of the extended family.

See you in September.

The Empire Is Striking Back

The Obama administration is now facing a real test of its resolve in Iraq. The depressing but utterly predictable resurgence of Sunni Jihadism in a country broken in 2003 and never put back together again by the “surge” has been so successful and the Iraqi government so weak that even Kurdistan is now at risk. The policy now is to do enough – but no more – to keep the Kurds in the game, keep the Yazidis on planet earth and push the Iraqis in Baghdad to get real. I felt queasy when the president announced this intervention and feel queasier two days later. Even though attempted genocide creates a uniquely grave crisis, as soon as the US is committed militarily to an open-ended endeavor in that country, and is in any way dependent on the Iraqis to take the lead, then we are at the mercy of that country’s profound dysfunction once again. It is quicksand. One foot in and you start sinking.

Or you can think of Iraq as perhaps the least reformable of all welfare dependents. Chronically divided, disintegrating yet again at a particularly explosive moment in Middle Eastern madness, it will always seem on the brink of some disaster or other. The temptation to go in again – especially since we gave it tens of thousands of corpses and years of trauma to add to its chaotic polity – is great. And Obama’s signature achievement so far has been his steadiness in resisting that vortex, in defusing Jihadism rather than giving it yet more reason to be inflamed, in being that rare president capable of internalizing what most Americans want – rather than what Sunday talk show blowhards demand.

He still has a chance to do that – but it will be much, much tougher now. Give the hegemonists some blood in the water, and they will soon swarm, demanding more war, and more meddling. You can see that dynamic in the idiotic ravings of John McCain who wants a full-scale war against ISIL – or in the classic scare tactics of Butters, with the inane idea that we have to fight them over there or they will come here. It is madness as strategy – madness that already created catastrophe. But no one responsible for that catastrophe in Washington was ever held accountable – they’re doing their damndest right now to make sure war criminals are white-washed as well – and so their ability to snap back right to 2003 is intact.

And the greatest throwback to 2003 in this respect is Hillary Clinton. So far as one can tell from her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no daylight between her and John McCain or even Benjamin Netanyahu – but a hell of a lot of space between her and Barack Obama. The interview confirms my view that she remains neoconservatism’s best bet to come back with bells on. It appears, for example, that her boomer-era pabulum about foreign policy on the Jon Stewart show – “We need to love America again! – was not an aberration. She actually means it. And once we believe in ourselves again – don’t look at that torture report! – it will be back to the barricades for another American century of American global hegemony. And why not start in Syria and Iraq? I mean: she’s already hepped up about the threat of Jihadism – and what could possibly go wrong this time? If only we believe in America!

You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward. One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.

Just forget that this country destroyed its military deterrence and its moral authority by the war that Clinton favored and has never fully expressed remorse for. Forget the trillions wasted and the tens of thousands of lives lost and the brutal torture we authorized and the hapless occupation that helped galvanize Jhadism, let’s just feel good about ourselves! And do it all again!

And so try and find a real difference between John McCain and Hillary Clinton on these topics. It’s certainly the same “fight them over there so we don’t fight them over here” fear-mongering:

One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States. Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.

Well, actually, their raison d’etre is not to be against the West. Right now and for the foreseeable future, it is about defeating the apostates of Shia Islam and wimpy Sunni Islam. It’s about forcing other Muslims to submit to their medieval authority – with weapons left behind from the last American interventionist project. The West for these Jihadis is a long, long way away. But not for Clinton or for McCain who see every struggle anywhere as involving the US because … America! And that’s when you realize how fresh Obama was and how vital he has been – and how in foreign policy, a Clinton presidency is such a contrast to his.

Among those most eager for a return of the past is, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu. And you see in the interview with Goldberg how closely Clinton’s views mirror his. She hits every single neocon talking point: the Israelis have no responsibility for the killing of hundreds of children because “there’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict … So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.” That’s almost a paraphrase of the Israeli prime minister or Joan Rivers (take your pick of the nuance artists). And Clinton even backs Netanyahu’s recent dismissal of a two-state solution! Yep: she’s not just running to succeed Barack Obama, there are times in the interview when it seems she’s running against him:

“If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over [West Bank] security, because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience.”

Again, you see how fresh Obama was. And what more could the entire neocons wish for? Oh wait: yes! They can also get their most cherished of dreams – a new war on Iran! Listen to Clinton parrot every AIPAC trope:

“I’ve always been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment,” Clinton said. “Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such little enrichment that they could not break out.” When I asked her if the demands of Israel, and of America’s Arab allies, that Iran not be allowed any uranium-enrichment capability whatsoever were militant or unrealistic, she said, “I think it’s important that they stake out that position.”

Clinton’s position is Netanyahu’s. And that’s important to understand. If you want a United States with no daylight between it and any Israeli government, whatever that government may do, vote for Clinton. If you want someone who believes the Libya intervention was the right thing to do, vote for Clinton. If you think America’s problem is not torture or drones or destabilizing occupations or debt but that we don’t tell the world how great we are enough, then vote for Clinton. If you really long for 2003 again, vote for Clinton.

She may be the only option – if the GOP nominates a full-bore pro-torture neocon. But isn’t it amazing that after the catastrophes of the Bush-Cheney era, both parties could effectively be running neocons for the presidency in 2016! Welcome to Washington – where the past is always present, amnesia is a lubricant, and the leading Democrat is running as a neocon. That change you could believe in? Not if Washington has the final say.

How The Dead Live On

Hannah Black talks to historian Thomas Laqueur about his book The Work of the Dead, which describes how the development of the cemetery changed cultural attitudes toward death:

Before the Enlightenment, the only place you could get buried without ignominy was the churchyard. With the development of the cemetery, the dead make new kinds of communities. In churchyards, the graves were all oriented east-west. In the English churchyard, there’s a particular botany: The yew tree is the tree of the churchyard. There’s only one kind of person in the churchyard: a Christian. There’s no private property in the churchyard, everything belongs to the community. Every monument has to have the approval of the parish priest, so you can’t build what you want there. The churchyard is a communal space, and it’s a space that belongs to the parish. Others can come in, but only by paying extra.

The cemetery is a place where (in theory) anyone can buy property, and you can lie next to anyone, and you can be buried in any direction you want to be buried.

You can write anything you want on the tombstone. You can be any religion. If you’re Jewish, some rabbis might not be willing to bury you, but some rabbis would. It’s an open space, and people built according to the sensibilities of the day. Just like you can choose clothes that are slightly retro, the large cemeteries provided big tombs and they provided graves that looked like Egyptian tombs and Roman-style plinths, and you could present yourself in whatever way you wanted. The colonial cemetery in Calcutta looks like an imperial cemetery, it doesn’t look like a churchyard.

In Europe, every nation starts by producing national cemeteries. The first thing the Czechs do is produce a national cemetery. So the dead can produce all kinds of communities.

(Photo of Czech national cemetery at Terezin by Scott Lowe)

Quote For The Day II

“He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoke to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air,” – John Williams, Stoner.

A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn:

This poem by an anonymous author, framed as a riddle as so many early lyrics are, is from Volume One of Poets of the English Language: Langland to Spenser, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and published in 1950 in The Viking Portable Library.

I persist in thinking the knight has posed four questions.

“The Riddling Knight”:

There were three sisters fair and bright,

Jennifer gentle and rosemaree,

And they three loved one valiant knight.

As the dew flies over the mulberry tree.

The eldest sister let him in,

And barred the door with a silver pin.

The second sister made his bed,

And placed soft pillows under his head.

The youngest sister, fair and bright,

Was resolved for to wed with this valiant knight.

“And if you can answer questions three,

O then, fair maid, I will marry with thee.

“What is louder than an horn,

And what is sharper than a thorn?”

“Thunder is louder than an horn,

And hunger is sharper than a thorn.”

“What is broader than the way,

And what is deeper than the sea?”

“Love is broader than the way,

And hell is deeper than the sea.”

“And now, fair maid, I will marry with thee.”

(Photo by T. Kiya)