As many as 3.5 million people gathered in Paris on Sunday for the Unity Rally and several world leaders including Angela Merkel and David Cameron were in attendance.
Responding to terrorist strikes that killed 17 people in France and riveted worldwide attention, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists and people of all races, ages and political stripes swarmed central Paris beneath a bright blue sky, calling for peace and an end to violent extremism.
At The Nation, Laila Lalami writes about how we must resist simple explanations for last week’s terror attacks in Paris.
To make sense of the senseless, we tell ourselves stories. The story is that this is the latest salvo in an ongoing clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The story is that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was the last bastion of free thought in a cowed press, a press that has bowed to political correctness and is now too afraid to criticize Islam. The story is that Muslim leaders remain silent about this atrocity. The story is that France has failed to integrate its Muslim citizens, descendants of immigrants from its former colonies. The story is that France has sent troops to fight in Muslim countries. The story is that there are double standards.
Teju Cole also offered nuanced thoughts on Charlie Hebdo in The New Yorker.
This week’s events took place against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab. Blacks have hardly had it easier in Charlie Hebdo: one of the magazine’s cartoons depicts the Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, who is of Guianese origin, as a monkey (naturally, the defense is that a violently racist image was being used to satirize racism); another portrays Obama with the black-Sambo imagery familiar from Jim Crow-era illustrations.
People have strange obsessions and in Portland, there is a communal interest in the airport’s carpet. True story.
Portland Monthly has extensively profiled and memorialized the carpet, which was designed by SRG Architects in 1987. The composition reportedly reflects the airport’s intersecting runways; the color scheme most definitely bucks the tradition of using neutral colors for something more in keeping with the city’s quirky Pacific Northwestern identity. For a carpet pattern, it almost looks like aSuprematist painting.
That hotel in The Shining? They are looking for someone to build them a maze.
The more I travel, the more obsessed I become with airline practices so I was totally fascinated about this New Yorker piece about hidden city tickets.
In the summer of 2013, after graduating with a major in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, Zaman was searching for a flight from New York City to Seattle and found that the best deal, for less than two hundred dollars, included a layover in San Francisco. On a whim, he searched for flights from New York to San Francisco and discovered that the New York-to-San Francisco leg of his flight was priced, if it were purchased as a single direct flight, at nearly three hundred dollars. This struck him, he told me, as strange and inefficient: Why wouldn’t someone simply purchase the two-leg flight, if it were cheaper, and then just not fly on the second leg? He learned after some research that this practice is well documented and has a name: hidden-city ticketing.
Last night was the Golden Globes and it was a pretty good ceremony, particular during the first hour when Jill Soloway won for Transparent and Gina Rodriguez won for Jane, The Virgin. These wins felt important because they represented how when we’re allowed to tell diverse stories, great art can be made.
Prince also showed up.
**image via Dodai Stewart
