Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, read Tala Woods’ moving piece on being an Englishwoman with a Syrian background.
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‘The Trigger Effect‘ (Hallie Lieberman for The Atavist)
This is a lengthy read and it’s worth every minute. Lieberman brings both professional journalistic skills and personal connections to bear in this sensitive review of the Scout Schultz shooting — and what happened after.
Tyler Beck, the officer who’d killed Scout, hadn’t received training to navigate situations involving people in psychiatric crisis. Beck, who’d been on the force for 16 months and had gone on paid leave pending an investigation of the shooting, hadn’t completed the crisis-intervention training because it wasn’t mandatory.
‘Having the Wrong Conversations about Hate Activity‘ (Anonymous for Longreads)
The way we talk about ‘hate activity’ is broken at a time when acts of hate are growing more open and more audacious.
Reader, I read the comments. Not under news stories but in threads under links to news stories I posted on social media that got shared and reshared. I’m not talking about goading, gloating bigots. I don’t run across these on social media, which organizes your feed according to your predilections. I encountered people who concur in theory but disagree in nuance. First, I worried some were finding the hate activity shocking in a not entirely unpleasant, adrenaline-rush, horror-flick way: revulsion mixed with thrill. Others read the accounts and wished they hadn’t. I get it. If I could have unlearned it and felt responsible, a mother alert to threats, I would have.
‘The Bullet in My Arm‘ (Elaina Plott for The Atlantic)
How does your stance on gun control change after you’ve been shot?
These were not the details the police wanted me to remember. Like detectives on a TV show, they asked me to close my eyes and relive the drive. The way the air smelled, the sound of the other cars. But I was not a TV character, could not conjure the missing fact that would give meaning to all the others. (A beer can clattering across the street—for some reason, they seemed to think I might have heard a beer can clattering across the street.)
‘Mission Unstoppable: Inside the All-Female Trek to the North Pole‘ (Jane C. Hu for Wired)
An all-female team set out for the North Pole, for science.
So when the opportunity to study this expedition team presented itself, Bergouignan knew she had to take it. That opportunity was years in the making; the seed for the expedition was planted in 2009, after Aston, this expedition’s leader, had led a different expedition of women to the opposite pole.
‘The Girdle-Inspired History of the Very First Spacesuits‘ (Jasmin Malik Chua for Racked)
The history of the spacesuit is mesmerising, and it contains some surprises!
A flurry of activity followed. A skeleton crew of little more than a dozen engineers and technicians began working 24-hour shifts. They picked the locks of their own labs and storerooms, some of them freshly vacated by visitors from Hamilton, to obtain supplies and records in the dead of the night. They batch-tested bodies of suits alongside alternative arms, legs, and joints.
Photo: Helen Van Eykeren