October 13, 2015 edition

Before violence, there is no zero point. Before violence, there is other violence that we do not always acknowledge, and probably do not always recognize.
I am fortunate to have been born more than 70 years ago and am still here today to tell storiesI can remember my father who was shot, my uncle who was shot, my neighbors who were shot, the village head who was kidnapped by guerilla fighters and stabbed through the heart, the woman who had been a Dutchman's unofficial wife who was robbed and then buried alive under the kapok tree, the former leader of the revolutionary struggle who was invited outside by two visitors to his house, and then shot through the head, right beside the bamboo grove.

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More Sidelines articles in other editions

October 6, 2015 edition

There's an old pair of shoes that became famous, far beyond the thoughts of their unknown maker.
In 1886, the Dutch artist Van Gogh, who was then living in Paris, went to a flea market. He saw a pair of shoes and bought them. One rainy day he went out walking in them, and walked for a long time. He wanted to wear the shoes outbefore painting them. It is claimed he said, "Dirty shoes and roses can both be good in the same way."

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September 29, 2015 edition

An old man, almost mute, his memory gone, and so too his son in a terrifying history: the senile man in Joshua Oppenheimer's film, The Look of Silence.
In Oppenheimer's film, which sets out to show the cruelty in Indonesia in the mid 1960s, this semi-paralyzed figure seems like an allegory of the horror and silence of the past.

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September 22, 2015 edition

There is a city of fantasy that is divided. But maybe this is not so unusual. Every large city is divided.
On one level, living space is shaped by the wealthy; on another, the poor and the marginalized. On one side is the part that always wants to be on show, as scene; on the other, the part that wants to be hidden, the obscene.

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September 15, 2015 edition

...and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral...
-W.H. Auden
That photo-that shocking photo, the one we can't bear to look at, the one we worry will make sensitive people the world over have nightmares-has quickly become the symbol of our current anxiety. The body of a small three-year-old boy lying facedown on the shore. His tiny, fragile forehead dipped in the waves that washed his body back up on Turkish soil. The blue of his shorts and the red of his t-shirt seem to be calling out to the entire Bodrum Peninsula.

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September 8, 2015 edition

The police found a truck abandoned in a remote Austrian village on the side of the highway between Vienna and Budapest. There was a putrid smell. Soon it became clear why: seventy-one rotting bodies were inside the truck. Corpses of migrants. They died most probably of suffocation, lack of oxygen where they were hiding or had been hidden, full of fear and hope that they could make it across Austria.
Doom has become routine in the lives of those who no longer have a homelandthose who travel great distances to change their fate. Just a few days before the truck was found in the village of Parndorf, 40 people were found dead in the Mediterranean, piled up in a boat that had left the coast of Libya five hours earlier headed for Italy. They had been killed by petrol fumes in the cramped, overheated engine room.

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September 1, 2015 edition

Science begins with a child's wonder.
Alfred Russell Wallace-the Englishman who together with Charles Darwin discovered the 'theory of evolution'-noted how, as a child, he had been fascinated watching bees. He found bees a marvel in every meadow, and thought anyone unfamiliar with them missed out on an endless source of enjoyment and fascination.

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