Ann Friedman - The brain takes snapshots

In the US, "if you don't know what it's like to be from a community that's experienced mass violence perpetrated by a gunmen, you just have to wait." 

This week, the violence that we've collectively decided is inevitable came for Michigan State University, which happens to be the workplace of someone I love. She is ok. She is also not ok. She has to look these students in the face, witness their fear and anguish, and tell them that we—collectively—are doing nothing about it.  

It's maddening to watch the vigils and hashtags once again melt into a debate about logistics: Whether and how to barricade a campus. The feasibility of metal detectors. The exact means by which this shooter obtained a gun, and the many missed chances to remove it from his hands. A sickening narrative loop with only one real takeaway: Just wait.
 

Danyel Smith spent some time with SZA, who "sings the inky secrets of women’s journals," and came back with a really beautiful portrait of the artist. Plus Okechukwu Nzelu on Beyoncé's Renaissance as "part of a broader conversation, an engagement with the Black queer community."

A "stupid, brutal, and improbable vanity project": Kate Wagner on The Line, the luxury horizontal skyscraper in the Saudi Arabian desert. Plus, Mikkel Snyder on the "cracked wonder" of Cementland in St. Louis.

"I finally felt great. I finally felt strong.”Jean Chen Ho visits a picket line in North Hollywood, where the topless dancers of Star Garden are striking for the right to form a union.

Chase Strangio on what's at stake at the intersection of reproductive justice and trans liberation. Very much related: I signed the letter from NYT contributors to leadership, asking them to consider the framing and impact of their reporting on trans issues.

I love libraries. How the groundbreaking film Framing Agnes shatters the documentary format. A lost interview with Clarice Lispector, found.

Do you think Wet Leg's moodboard for the BRIT Awards was just Picnic at Hanging Rock x Human Behaviour? Delicious.

Apparently "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" is true on a neurological level:

"The brain takes snapshots, kind of like the individual frames of a celluloid film. When these snapshots are called up from memory banks, the brain acts as an editor, stitching the snapshots together to create what feels like a seamless narrative... The brain, though, is an imperfect editor. Our memories are, at best, compressed recordings of events. To reconstitute actual events in the mind's eye, the brain needs a template, some sort of storyboard on which to arrange its snapshots."

- Gregory Berns, The Self Delusion