“Gordon Parks went back to Rio to save a boy’s life. What happened next was a lot more complicated,” The Washington Post
Sebastian Smee tells the story behind the photographs in a new show at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, “Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story.” Parks, who lived in St. Paul and Minneapolis in his late teens until he moved to Chicago in the 1940s, was the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine. Smee tells how his assignment to find poverty in Brazil fed a media battle that was itself a skirmish in the Cold War. — Peter Callaghan, state government reporter
On today’s battlefields, more women than ever are in the fight,” National Geographic
U.S. laws have allowed women to serve in aviation and naval combat roles since the early 1990s, but only recently have the rules loosened so that women can do frontline fighting, per this National Geographic story. The photo slideshow of the female officers gave me goosebumps. — Jessica Lee, local government reporter
“The Yankees’ decade of almost; $2 billion spent, zero titles won,” The Wall Street Journal
The Twins may have lost to the Yankees again, but I took some joy in reading this WSJ look at how billions in spending on bloated payrolls in the Bronx have not paid off over the last decade. I say either contract them, or move them to Montreal! — Walker Orenstein, environment and workforce reporter
“We Need Indigenous Wisdom to Survive the Apocalypse,” The Walrus
This piece traces the Haudenosaunee story of the origins of their Great Law of Peace, after the author attended the Haudenosaunee’s commemoration of the founding of their constitution. Rather than only telling the story of this event, the author considers what wisdom a government like theirs, which has and continues to live through apocalypse, can teach us, especially in how we understand land, water, and other living things. — Jonathan Stegall, user experience engineer
