2 of 4
• Cancel August, says David Plotz in Slate.
PLACES & CULTUREFrom the Washington Post:
TOKYO — The deaths of … three men marked only one incident in an extraordinary string of Internet suicides to hit Japan. Over the past six months, police investigators say at least 32 people—mostly in their teens and twenties— have killed themselves nationwide after meeting strangers online. Many more young Japanese have entered into online suicide pacts, but either failed in their attempts or backed out at the last minute. Psychiatrists and suicide experts are linking the phenomenon to a profound national identity crisis during Japan's 13-year economic funk. Indeed, the Internet deaths come at a time when Japan is undergoing an alarming surge in its overall suicide rate—with financial problems cited as the fastest growing reason for despair. … Though Western, religion-based stigmas of suicide do not exist here, the Internet deaths have nevertheless dismayed this island nation, becoming a dominant topic in chat rooms and the subject of a new play. Full story
LAS VEGAS — The worst year in the life of Alex Arreguin III ends where it began, in the Greyhound bus station on Main Street. This time Arreguin, 43, isn't arriving, he's leaving. It isn't midnight, but the afternoon, and instead of walking out of the bus station, he is sitting on the dirty floor while his companion, Diane Garcia, 39, is out front, wrestling down her doubts with a cigarette. … In search of a better life, the two came here from recession-hit Texas last summer. With Las Vegas's distinction as the fastest-growing area of the United States, there seemed no better place for two people to find good jobs. But 54 weeks have taught them a hard-earned truth: that in a fragile economy, if one thing goes wrong, a person on the margins can very quickly skid into what they have become—broke, jobless and without a home. Silly with promise when they arrived, they are now creatures of charity, from the donated clothes they are wearing, to the dismal places they have been sleeping, to the bus tickets back to Houston that they were presented with just an hour before by a local social services organization. … Since last month, dozens of people who came here to work have been sent back to home towns from Florida to Alaska. Full story
DIGESTFor links with an * you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"
• As of last month's fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, one of the finest champions of that dream isn't a black civil rights leader, but a white conservative Republican, writes Peter Beinart in the New Republic. Alabama governor Bob Riley "is that rarest of creatures: a genuinely inspiring politician," Beinart says. The formerly anti-tax Riley looked at Alabama's tax system, under which the poor pay more than twice as high of a percentage of their income in taxes than the wealthy do, and declared it to be unfair. Not just unfair, but biblically wrong, given God's call to tend to the "least among us," Riley said. His plan to reform the system, which goes to a vote tomorrow, is expected to fail, due in part to the conspicuous failure of civil rights leaders to rally support in the state, Beinart says. "Riley's plan would arguably do more for black and poor Alabamians than anything since the civil rights era," he writes. "And yet, as far as I can tell, it received not a single mention at last week's anniversary March on Washington." Beinart declines to speculate why civil rights leaders are AWOL in Alabama—are they too northern and coastal in focus, too prone to pick symbolic fights (such as the number of African Americans on network sitcoms) over more practical ones, or, in this case, both? Full story*
share this page
RSS Feed
