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redgoldsparks · 6 years

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January Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

I had very mixed feelings about this book. There were aspects of it I really liked and others I didn't like at all. The first 40 pages were a struggle, in which a character I didn't yet care about was forced to suffer in somewhat irritating ways, with consequences I didn't yet understand. I might have given it up at that point except so many people told me they love this book. After page 40, the middle section suddenly unfolded in a strange, whimsical, and intriguing way. I came to really appreciate the two sisters (Constance and Merricat) who have lived in the Blackwood family home with their uncle since the entire rest of their family died. Pages 40-100 were really enjoyable. Then the last 40 pages (it's a short book) were once again difficult to read, but this time because characters that I cared for were suffering.

The Hidden Witch by Molly Knox Ostertag

This is a really nice follow up to the previous book. The story is less focused on Aster and spreads out into a group of teens, some magic, some not, all trying to figure out which direction they want to go in life. The story takes place over about one week, and in this one the big battle is not against a cursed dragon, but against the bruises and wounds life deals to every misfit teen. The art is clear and effective. I want to use this book as a model for my own next comic, keeping in mind that an all ages comic does not have to be complex to be good: sometimes a sweet small story about feelings hits exactly right.

Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki

This is a beautiful book about a terrible subject. It's a fictionalized memoir of one unit of the Japanese Imperial army stationed on an island in Papua New Guinea during WWII. The soldiers, who are under-prepared, underfeed and under-informed, struggle against the unfamiliar climate and ecosystem. Before they even see the enemy many have died of fevers, malaria and freak accidents such as crocodile attacks and attempting to fish with hand grenades. But even the ones who survive these deadly mishaps are doomed, because they have a manic hotheaded commander who has his sights set on a suicide mission. The characters are drawn in a loose, cartoony style set against a hyper-realistic, gorgeously rendered background. Some of the drawings of sky and forest took my breath away. However, I struggled to tell the characters apart because of the minimal portrait style. I think I was less emotionally effected than I might have been since I was often unable to follow a character's path throughout the book.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

This book swept me away. Set in Victorian England, it tells the story of a small town on the Essex coast which is haunted by the rumor of a deadly sea serpent. It is also the story of Cora Seabourne, who's abusive husband has recently died, leaving her a happy window finally free to pursue her interests in science and natural history. She believes the Essex Serpent may be a prehistoric beast which has survived to modern times. It is also the story of Cora's circle of friends- two doctors, a union organizer for the working class, a member of government, a county parson and his wife- who are all, to some extent or another, in love which each other's minds, or bodies, or both. Feelings intersect with clashes of ideals, often argued about on long walks through a richly described landscape- bare branches against a soft grey sky, vivid green moss covering leaf mold and dark soil. Whether or not the Serpent exists, every character is tangled in it's coils.

Upgrade Soul by Ezra Claytan Daniels

This comic pulls no punches. It's a complicated and emotional story of human scientific daring and utter folly. The lead characters are Hank and Molly Nonnar, a couple who have been married for 45 years. Molly is a doctor and researcher, and Hank is an author who writes novels about the popular sci-fi character his father invented in the 1950s. A big movie deal gives him the funds to begin investing in a ground-breaking, but under-tested, experiment: a way to rejuvenate and improve the body at the cellar level. Hank and Molly sign up as the first human test subjects, and the results are stranger and more devastating than either could ever have imagined. Gorgeously drawn and luminously colored.

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

I was expecting a hefty sci-fi novel for adults when I put this on hold at the library, but what arrived instead was a YA steampunk fairy tale. It was very enjoyable, and surprisingly clever! Set in a loosely defined dystopian future, the action begins in London, which is now a Traction city. The Traction cities of Europe roll over hills, plains, and the dusty beds of ancient long-dried oceans on massive wheels, chasing down smaller towns and devouring them. This is Municipal Darwinism at work, and Tom, a Third Class Apprentice in London's museum, has been taught that it is right and noble that the strong should grown stronger by ingesting the weak. Only when he falls from London and has to survive in a shattered landscape of deserts, marshes, pirates, slavers, rogue towns and Anti-Traction League spies does he begin to realize that what he grew up believing in might actually be monstrous.

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

I have read a lot of books about dragons- see my entire "dragon books" goodreads shelf- but this one has some delightful elements I've never read before. It begins with an English's Navy ship's capture of a French vessel during the Napoleonic Wars. Captain William Laurence is at first delighted when he learns that the captured ship was carrying a prized dragon egg; then he is dismayed, when he learns how near it is to hatching. To be considered "tame" a dragon must be named and harnessed by a human before it's first feeding; the human who does this will be paired with the dragon for life, and during war-time serve in the Air Corp of his majesty's army. Laurence has no desire to upend his successful Navy life for an entirely new (and less respected) branch of the military- but he is the one chosen by the dragonet, who he names Temeraire. This is the beginning of a growing friendship, a coming of age, and a deepening education for them both. They are eventually assigned to re-training at a distant Scottish dragon covet. I loved the scenes of their practices and maneuvers, and the fact that a military dragon in this world is staffed by an entire crew. Aside from the captain, each dragon has a signal-flagger, a medic, bombers, gunmen, runners, a team of harnessers and more. These dragon fights are more like high-speed tall-ship battles in the air than like two eagles clawing at each other. Well researched and very engaging, with the emotional relationship of humans and dragons at it's heart. Laurence would not have chosen Temeraire, but once Temeraire has chosen him, his life is changed forever.

FTL Y'all edited by C. Spike Trotman

I need to say up top that my review of this book is biased, because I am one of the contributors. Regardless- this book is FANTASTIC. Each story plays with the premise of a world in which faster than light speed engines exist, and can be built at a relatively low cost by a layperson. Many of the stories feature queer or POC characters. Some include contact with alien life- others with colonization, scientific exploration, families, separation and reunion, depression, joy- it's a rich feast. I can't even pick out favorites, because all of the stories were so strong!

Public Relations by Katie Heaney and Arianna Rebolini

This book is a BLATANT self-insert 1D fanfiction turned into a novel, and you know I eat that shit up with a spoon. The main character is Rose Reed, a 26 year old assistant at a PR firm in New York. The chance of a lifetime lands in her lap when she is asked to sit in on a PR strategy meeting for Archie Fox (cough*Harry Styles*cough) a former youtube singer-star who has developed a mega following of teenage girls. Unfortunately, his latest album wasn't a hit and his manager is worried his next one won't be either without some major help. Rose proposes a winning strategy- a manufactured romance with up and coming pop darling Raya. Archie accepted this plan with one condition- Rose must be his contact and head of the project at the PR firm. How much romance can Rose invent without getting caught up in it herself? Will her lesbian best friend be able to contain her feels when the opportunity comes to plan outfits for Archie/Harry? Will Rose's growing crush ruin everything and cost her her job? You can probably guess the answers to all of these questions yourself, but if you don't a bit of predictability, there's plenty to enjoy in this celebrity whirlwind romance.

Ink in Water by Lacy Davis and Jim Kettner

This book has been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad I finally snagged it. It's a beautifully drawn black and white comics memoir of self-esteem, eating disorders, recovery and body positivity. At the start of the book, Lacy is an art student living in Portland, Oregon. She's a punk, a zine maker, a feminist, a voracious reader, bisexual and owner of many Bikini Kill albums. But despite her politics, the seeds of a deep body anxiety are waiting in the dark to grown into an addiction to exercise and food control which ends up taking over Lacy's entire life. Her path to recovery is long and includes some painful set backs, but with art, music, and love at her side Lacy works to regain her balance and move forward.

#books #reading #book reviews #comic reviews #comic books

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graduatechronicles · 5 years

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Week Two Reading List

My second week of graduate school has come to a close. Despite being sick, for the second week in a row, I felt very content with the progress that I’ve made this week. To summarize this week, I’ll just briefly reflect on the things that I’ve read this week.

Academic Reading

What Research District Leaders Find Useful (Penuel, Farrell, Allen, Toyama, Coburn, 2018). This study examined what educational research is used by district leaders and how. The top uses of educational research are: to support district leader’s own professional learning, to provide instructional leadership, to design policies, programs, and initiatives, and to support and monitor implementation efforts. We are currently critiquing this study in small groups during class time.

Marching Forward, Marching in Circles: A History of Problems and Dilemmas in Teacher Preparation (Schneider, 2017). This essay provides a historical account of teacher preparation in the United States. The history is split into four eras: Teaching Unregulated (1800-1860), Early Bureaucracy (1860-1920), Late Bureaucracy (1920-1980), and Resurgent Deregulation (1980 - Present). Throughout the descriptions of the eras, Schneider poses problems and dilemmas of teacher preparation over time. The difference between problems and dilemmas is that problems and be solved, dilemmas can only be managed. For example, a problem in Era I was that standards for teacher preparation were null; this was fixed over time with increasing standards. But the associated dilemma is that we must balance with these standards with teaching remaining an accessible career, lest we are left with a shortage of teachers. Personally, I enjoyed the articles historical methods. It inspired me to start thinking about writing a similar piece to highlight the challenges of classical education in the United States, particularly in the university setting. I have been interested in writing a higher education piece about the state of the humanities Classics for awhile now, and I think this would be a great starting point.

The Case for Self-Care as a Core Practice for Teaching (Peercy, 2019). Peercy highlights the particular challenges of novice ESOL teachers in secondary schools. Their unique struggles include having to work with students that are emotional traumatized, prove themselves and their worth in the school system, and counteract the perceptions of other professionals, which frequently will use ESOL teachers for grunt work. Just coming out of my first year of teaching ESOL in the private sector, this article was particularly interesting to me. It encouraged me to think about the struggles that I had as a novice teacher, namely: a feeling of dispensability as a teacher, a lack of trust and support in staff, and expectations for unpaid administrative work and preparation. I’m curious to how much research has been done on other private sector teachers. In seminar on Thursday, Peercy herself spoke to us via webcam and discussed her research methods, qualitative and inclusive of self-study. The most interesting part of the conversation was that she and the participants “co-generated knowledge” involved in this study. Until the teachers involved in the study started discussing what was happening with other teachers, they didn’t necessarily realize that self-care was what they each were missing to counteract their stress.

I also read Piaget’s Theory of Development and I also have a few extra associated readings that I have not attended to yet. I will likely follow up later on these, but what I will mention now is that I was really challenged by Piaget. I have never read anything in the field of development, psychology, cognition, etc., etc.!

In terms of Greek this week, we translated an adaption of Herodotus. I fervorously studied principal parts and subjunctive forms for yesterday’s quiz...but it ended up just being more Herodotus.

Personal Reading

Empress (Shan Sa). I’m about halfway through this novel. At first I was disinterested by it, but the pace picked up pretty quickly and the dynamics of the Inner Court during the Tang Dynasty became fascinating to me. I’m pretty hooked on it now.

The Academic Self (Donald Eugene Hall). I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m also hooked on this read. So far, it’s just been a commentary on the struggles of life in academia. That’s of course relevant to me, so I’m looking forward to continuing through and posting some reflections every once in awhile.

“Gin, Sex, Malaria, and the Hunt for Academic Prestige” (Charles King). I loved this excerpt from King’s book regarding the adventures of early anthropologists and how their studies influenced not just anthropology, but social science at large. My biggest takeaway from this reading is the length of which an academic’s work is an extension of his or herself. Margaret Mead wrote in a letter: “I’m more than ever convinced that the only logical place for the anthropologist is in the field — most of the time — for the first ten years, or even fifteen years of his anthropological life.” To me, Mead’s use of “logical” indicates urgency, and this reminds me of myself; I have often felt an urgency to needing to be on campus, in classrooms, among library shelves. As anthropologists must be in the field, academics must be in the academy.

I’ve read even more this week, undoubtedly, but I’m content to wrap up here. This weekend, I want to do more than what is expected of me and meet progress towards my goals. For today, I have to complete my Piaget readings, write discussion questions, and hopefully finish two abstracts so I can review them with my advisor and submit them to their respective conferences! I’m so excited!

#gradblr #reading #academia

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geekade · 7 years

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Little House: Revisiting a Childhood Classic

To a girl who grew up in the 90s in New Jersey, the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s America, with her family constantly and directly affected and impeded by their environment and at times struggling just to survive, is an alien one. But in another sense, it is a very appealing picture. The Ingalls family were one another’s only entertainment, often only company, and though we often picture old-fashioned families as very stern, the Ingalls’ story is one filled with song, laughter, and love. Irecently reread this series after about a decade and a half, and it was a totally new experience. I engaged with the characters in a way I didn’t think would be possible, considering differences in time and lifestyle, and while I was reading, I felt like I was a member of the Ingalls family.

The series begins with Little House in the Big Woods, which takes place in the Big Woods in Wisconsin. This book centers around the Ingalls homesteading, and is probably the ‘coziest’ of the books, as it doesn’t touch as much on the dangers and difficulties of survival as much as the other books do. Laura, her older sister Mary, (and their baby sister Carrie, included in the story though chronologically not born yet), alternate playing and helping around the house, sometimes combining the two, and spend their evenings being entertained by their Pa’s fiddle and vivid storytelling. While living in Wisconsin, the Ingalls were near their cousins and grandparents, so we also get a glimpse into what it was like visiting family and hosting social visitors in this time period.

Growing up, this was my favorite book in the series and has had a massive influence on who I am as a person. I love gardening and homesteading-related hobbies. I love to sew. I hope one day to own enough land to grow the majority of my own produce, and to preserve and store it as the Ingalls did. But more than the influence it had on me, I treasure the impressions it left me with as a child. The lively family in this story is nothing like how they appear in photographs - stern, and grayscale, their clothes restrictive and mouths tight. The young Ingalls family read just like any other family - loving, interdependent upon one another, and truly pleased with their lot in life.

Little House on the Prairie, technically the third book and the namesake of the TV series based loosely on the books, was the second book that I read during my re-read. I chose to omit the books centering around the childhood of Almanzo Wilder because when I initially read the series as a child, I had no idea they even existed. (I plan to follow up with them in future.) Little House on the Prairie chronicles the events of 1869-1870, in Kansas, where the Ingalls moved, following rumors that the nearby Indian Territory would soon be settled. Moving in a covered wagon from the Big Woods, the Ingalls suffer a number of hardships that come in as a stark contrast to those in the first book. One such is the “fever n’ ague” that the family comes down with (later identified as malaria) which puts them out of commission while a neighbor, Mrs. Scott, cares for them along with her own family. Mrs. Scott is one of a few companions of the Ingalls family in this book, another being Mr. Edwards, a bachelor from Tennessee, who later on plays “Santa Claus” for the children. At great risk to themselves, the Ingalls’ neighbors weave into the story by helping them through times that the Ingalls mightn’t have gotten through on their own. In 1870, the government announced that the land would not be open to settlers, and so the house that Pa Ingalls built on the land, and all of the work he’d done tilling the field came to nothing, and the family packed up to move East, closer to ‘civilization,’ where the girls could get educated.

I have to say, this particular re-read was the most incongruous to my memory. I may have conflated it with the following book in my mind, but the easy laughter and confidence of the Big Woods book is gone in this one. Pa Ingalls comes across as a more imposing, decisive character; moving his family from place to place on nearly no notice. Though the trek certainly was fascinating, and brings back old memories of playing Oregon Trail, I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as I expected to--ruined by my own memories and ideas about it, I guess. One thing I will say is that I grew an unexpected and truly fierce love for Jack the dog, though. Jack is the Ingalls family companion, and though he squares off against mountain lions and bears in the Big Woods, his protectiveness and stalwartness along the trail to Kansas is incredibly endearing, and his near loss is heartbreaking. (In real life, it wasn’t a heartbreaking near-loss, but an actual loss, and Jack didn’t journey from Kansas to Minnesota with the Ingalls.)

On the Banks of Plum Creek is what I had been expecting from Little House on the Prairie: community, family, adventure, and history, all within the setting of an untouched landscape in Minnesota. Living in a pre-“built” dugout home near the banks of Plum Creek, the Ingalls begin working on their wooden, above-ground home, while also gathering wild grass as hay for their horses and beginning again to till the land. Mary and Laura also go to school for the first time in this book, and the infamous Nellie Oleson is introduced. Nellie, I think, is a more infamous TV character than in the book, where she comes across as your average schoolyard bully, but Laura makes you hate her either way. Nellie is a shopkeeper’s daughter from New York State, and she makes sure everyone knows it and how many advantages it's given her. Rubbing her considerable wealth in everyone’s face, Nellie hosts a “town party” and invites the “farm girls” to join, almost for the purpose of flaunting her resources. Laura’s resulting jealousy inspires her to host her own, more fun party later in the year.

Unfortunately things take a turn, and a swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts literally wipe the traces of the Ingalls’ entire year's work from the earth, leaving them in debt, without food, and a little later, trapped by a snowstorm. Pa goes missing just before the blizzard, and is gone for two days before the blizzard lets up and he can make his way home--apparently having been trapped behind a hill only a few hundred yards from home.

Gosh this book was exciting, and immersive enough to get me saying “gosh.” As Laura ages and the Ingalls’ lives become more and more complicated, the story reveals more about America’s past and the private lives of citizens in the late 1800s than I could have imagined. The humanity and relatability of these characters is something I never would have applied to the early settlers of America’s farmland if I hadn’t read them.

The following book, By the Shores of Silver Lake, follows the Ingalls’ life in De Smet, South Dakota and introduces the fourth Ingalls child, Grace, as the baby. With ‘baby’ Carrie now getting a little older, she is responsible for helping around the house like Laura and Mary were, and is a more apt playmate for Laura as time goes on. However, this book opens with the surprise that Mary has gone blind from her illnesses previously mentioned in the other books, along with a bout of scarlet fever. (Mary’s blindness was later theorized to be due to a thyroid disease, and diabetes that plagued the entire Ingalls family.) Along with Mary’s sight, in this book, we lose Jack, a device Laura moved to this story to help signify the change from childhood to young adulthood. Jack’s peaceful death the day before the family’s long journey to South Dakota is sad, but they give him a wonderful last day filled with his favorite foods and games.

We gain some insight into Laura’s story-telling ability when Pa tells Laura to “be Mary’s eyes” and Laura becomes responsible for describing to Mary the many sights of their new home, and the move, and even the train that the family takes and its passengers. The train is also an exciting part of this story, and begins the relationship throughout the series between the train’s advancement, and America’s encroachments over unsettled land. Pa Ingalls even gets a job working for the railroad company as a paymaster, and the family is able to winter in the surveyor's house, making friends with the local Boast family and hosting workers and pioneers. The Ingalls home became almost an inn during that time, making the family a great deal of money by charging 25 cents for meals and board overnight, and thus begin saving to send Mary to a college for the blind that their former Reverend told them about on a visit. This story is the first to truly engage in the technological advancements and travel capabilities of America’s settlers. The Ingalls not only get visits from family, but make friends and see old ones as they travel across the country, settling in different states.

In The Long Winter, we not only get a true scope of the hardships faced by a family genuinely on their own as far as resources go, we also begin to get a sense of the small-town communities we know to be a big part of American culture today. Shops, inns, and homes begin to crop up in the area, and the Ingalls family winters in the center of town, to be closer to the train as well as the shops and fellow homesteaders. We also first meet Almanzo Wilder in this story, who in the fictionalized account was pretending to be 21 (actually 19) in order to lay a claim to unsettled land, but in reality was closer to 23 (Laura was 13.) Laura and Carrie attend school as often as possible, but are hindered and ultimately stopped entirely by successive blizzards which bury the town and make the roadsimpassable. Food dwindles and even the innovative methods of stretching their stores fail the Ingalls eventually. The blizzards continue for 7 months, and many throughout the town go without food until Almanzo Wilder shares his seed-grain with the locals, and the trains finally thaw, delivering a Christmas barrel of supplies and donated clothing to the weakened Ingalls’ home.

Despite being one of the shorter books, The Long Winter was certainly drama-packed, and at times I truly was scared while reading it, but ultimately I felt it could have been rolled into Little Town on the Prairie. Undoubtedly one of the most formative times in Laura’s life, this book was one where Laura began to really seize on adulthood and responsibility, often talking about protecting her younger sister Carrie, who’s discussed as being a sickly child (despite going on to be quite athletic in her adulthood). Little Town on the Prairie, however, is less focused on hardship and more focused on economy. Laura gets a job sewing for a shop in town in order to pay for Mary’s college education. When she’s let go, the family tries to sell crops, only to have their harvest destroyed by blackbirds. Finally, selling a cow for the money, Mary gets ready to go off to school with Pa and Ma escorting her, leaving Laura, Carrie, and Grace at home.

Again demonstrating her responsibility, Laura leads her sisters in the fall chores, leaving the house sparkling for Ma and Pa’s return. Nellie Oleson befriends the new schoolteacher, Almanzo Wilder’s sister, whose father is on the school board and who had consistently clashed with Nellie in the past, and turns her against the Ingalls girls. The younger students rally behind Laura and torment the new teacher, halting lessons essentially until Nellie joins in the bullying of Ms. Wilder and she eventually leaves. The new teacher helps Laura to achieve her teaching certificate, which Laura wants only to earn more money for Mary, and not because she wants to be a teacher (which she makes clear she does not). Around the same time, Almanzo Wilder begins walking Laura home from church, which Laura seems not to fully understand, but comes to appreciate. At the end of this book, Laura is offered a teaching position in a nearby town, and she prepares to move away from home for the first time.

I have to say, the minute Almanzo enters the story as Laura’s suitor, I began to get giddy. Laura’s narration seems almost willfully naive about his romance attempts, and I found myself rooting for their relationship hopefully, despite knowing that in reality, the couple were married until Almanzo’s death at 91. This feeling intensified in the following book, as Almanzo became Laura’s only rescue from her teaching position and boarding situation.

The book These Happy Golden Years starts out miserable, with 15-year-old Laura being driven by her Pa out to the teaching position from the previous book. Laura boards with the Brewster family, who, unlike her own family, allow animosities and arguments not only to surface, but to come to light in front of her. Mrs. Brewster begins with the silent treatment, but rapidly progresses to shouting at Laura, her husband, and anyone who will listen to her. Eventually, Laura wakes up to the sound of the Brewsters arguing because Mrs. Brewster was standing over her sleeping husband with a knife and he woke up. Almanzo Wilder, fond of Laura and having gotten permission from her Pa, appears each weekend to take Laura home. Throughout the season, Laura proves to be a good teacher; eventually gaining the respect of her students (some of whom were older than she was) and completing her school term, earning $40 for Mary’s college fund. When Laura returns to town, however, Nellie makes a move on Almanzo.

I have never hated anyone as much as I hated Nellie Oleson while reading this book. Nellie, in previous books, boasted about getting whatever she wanted from boys, often flirtily stealing their candy and gifts for other girls, and frequently mentioning that she wanted to go for a ride with Almanzo Wilder and his beautiful horses. Nellie gets her wish, and Almanzo takes her along on a few of his rides with Laura. Laura is eventually able to trick Nellie out of these rides by urging the horses to go faster and scaring Nellie out of repeat trips. Shortly afterwards, Nellie moves back to New York State due to financial hardships, and around the same time, the Ingalls are visited by a relative. Laura’s Uncle Tom, Ma’s brother, comes bearing tales of a terrifying trip to try to mine gold in the Black Hills. Laura later takes a short job helping a family with housework on their homestead, returning for a summer visit from Mary, and to attend singing classes with Almanzo. On their last day of class, Almanzo proposes to Laura, almost casually, and she accepts. On his next visit, he gives her a garnet ring with pearls, and her first kiss. A few months later, Almanzo finishes building their house, and asks if Laura would mind a quick wedding, so that his mother and sister don’t take over and host an enormous one. Laura agrees, and the two are quickly married by Reverend Brown, have a wedding dinner with Laura’s family, and settle into their marital home.

Maybe it’s the effect of having my own schoolhouse love in my life, but Almanzo and Laura’s three-year courtship took my breath away. In a time where most girls are more restrained, Almanzo admires Laura’s bravery and sense of adventure, and while she doesn’t admit much of her own admiration, Laura behaves possessively of Almanzo almost from the start. When Almanzo and Laura kiss for the first time, and Laura tells her parents about her engagement, I was just about jumping with joy, which was really embarrassing, because I was on the subway. It’s impossible not to feel caught up in their love, which is another thing that confronts expectations about old-fashioned families and courtships. Sure, there were fewer fish in Laura’s sea, but it’s obvious from the first time they walk home from church together that Laura and Almanzo were right for one another--just enough thirst for adventure and freedom, just enough seriousness and responsibility. Laura doesn’t want to be a “farm wife,” but promises Almanzo a few years of ‘trying it out,’ hence the title of the next book, The First Four Years.

The first four years of the Wilders’ marriage do not go very smoothly. Almanzo becomes briefly paralyzed, a condition which would continue to hinder him throughout his lifetime, and the environment and loans take their toll on the family’s resources. Much of the material in this book is more adult-oriented than the other books, but not by much. It was never finished by Laura, or edited by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (one of the founders of Libertarianism), but was found by Lane’s adopted grandson and subsequently published, and thus is less poetic and polished than the other books.

Unfortunately, the first crop of wheat the Wilders raise is destroyed by hail, and Almanzo mortgages his homestead claim. What they grow on the claim helps to pay for some of their debts and supplies, and Rose Wilder is born in December following Laura’s confusion at her own illness, which turned out to be her first pregnancy. Almanzo and Laura both get diptheria, and Almanzo subsequently struggles with physical disability. As he can no longer work all of his land, they sell their claim and move to their first home. Heat destroys their next crop, but they stay afloat with a flock of sheep Laura invests in. Hot winds destroy the harvest the following year as well, and their son is born in August, but dies a few weeks later, unnamed. At the end of the story, their house burns to the ground, but the story ends on an optimistic note, and the Wilders move to Mansfield, Missouri, where they lived out the rest of their days on a successful dairy farm.

While I was disappointed by The First Four Years because I’d hoped Laura and Almanzo lived joyfully together ever-after, it was incredible to see how the young family faced their struggles. While Laura’s family was never far off, while they lived in South Dakota, the Wilders were ultimately independent during this time, occasionally trading help with neighbors and family. I was also a little bummed to find out that the (to me) infamous Rose Wilder Lane was actually Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, but even this brought some revelations. Most of the struggles that the Wilder family, and to a certain extent the Ingalls, faced were made worse by government intervention, or lack of government protection, and it’s easy to see how Lane could have gotten the impressions on which she based her ideology. As a story arc, including The First Four Years in the Little House series makes it somewhat anti-climactic, with no real solution for the problems set up by this book, and no sequel, (after Almanzo’s death, Laura stopped writing) this story, for me, is a bit of a downer. However, knowing the historical fact of the Wilders’ happy lives together and the joy which Laura expressed and received from sharing her stories with the nation brings the tail end up again. Rereading these books felt like going on Laura’s adventures with her, and particularly from the perspective of a young adult, framed the incredible courage and strength of will put forth by my peers of over a century ago. It was a unique experience capable of being shared by anyone, which in my mind, is exactly what Laura meant to do--bring the entire world into her little house--and she succeeded.

#books #articles

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cosimaballettithomas-blog · 5 years

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Blog No. 11

The topic of this week’s readings was environmental hazards and their effects on humans. Miller’s Chapter 17: Environmental Hazards and Human Health describes the different kinds of hazards we face and the ways in which we can assess them. Riskaccording to Miller is “the probability of suffering harm from a hazard that can cause injury, disease, death, economic loss, or damage” while a risk assessment is “the process of using statistical methods to estimate how much harm a particular hazard can cause to human health, or to the environment” and lastly, risk management “involves deciding whether or how to reduce a particular risk to a certain level and at what cost” (Miller 2012, 437). Miller makes the point that risk damage is complicated by factors like media hype that causes people to obsess over unlikely risks such as plane crashes and ignore actual common risks, such as car accidents and heart attacks (437). Another example of this is cancer, which, according to the 2009 President’s Cancer Panel Report, affects 41% of Americans (President’s Cancer Panel 2009). I had no idea that number was so high and I must admit I am very surprised because I don’t directly know anyone who has suffered from cancer, which only serves to speak to my point that cancer is another common danger that people don’t actively think about like they do plane crashes, unless of course they have a strong family history of it, know people with cancer, etc.

There are many different kinds of hazards. A pathogen is a biological hazard and “an organism that can cause disease in another organism,” such as bacteria and viruses (Miller 2012, 438). Infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that invade cells or tissues and multiply, e.g. malaria and measles (438). A bacterial disease “such as tuberculosis spreads as the bacteria multiple” whereas a viral disease“such as flu or HIV spreads as viruses take over a cell’s genetic mechanisms to copy themselves.” Lastly, a transmissible or contagious disease is transmitted between people such as the flu and measles whereas a non-transmissible disease is not caused by living organisms and cannot be spread, e.g. cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes (Miller 2012, 438). Geography has a lot to do with the prevalence, origin, and spread of diseases. Malaria, for example and as aforementioned is an infectious disease caused by a parasite and spread by a specific kind of mosquito bite effectively killing red blood cells of the and leading to fever like symptoms and the deaths of almost 3000 people per day (Miller 2012, 444). These mosquitoes reside mostly in the southern hemisphere in Africa and East Asia, as well as northern Latin America (see image below). Miller explains that “during the 1950’s and 1960’s, the spread of malaria was sharply curtailed when swamplands and marches where mosquitoes breed were drained or sprayed with insecticides;” however, it has made a comeback largely due to tropical forest clearing and development (Miller 2012, 444).

(Treated UK)

In addition to biological hazards, chemical hazards also have harmful effects such as cancer and birth defects (Miller 2012, 446). Toxic chemicals are a kind of hazard that can severely harm human and animal health, e.g. arsenic and lead. Carcinogens are cancer causing chemicals that can cause malignant, cancerous cells to multiply rapidly leading to the development of tumors (446). Another chemical hazard are PCBs which “are a class of more than 200-chlorine containing organic compounds” that can become vaporized when they enter the air and were for a long time used in products such as lubricants, paints, and pesticides (Miller 2012, 446). PCBs were banned in 1977 in response to a litany of studies showing evidence of their cancer-causing capacity. However, because PCBs are so stable, nonflammable and have slow break-down times, they will remain in the environment for a long time (447). This just goes to show how important the role of science is in informing us about how our processes and habits are affecting not only the environment but our health, as explicated by the video, “Body Pollution, Chemical Toxicity” which shows old NBC footage reporting on research that discovered evidence of chemicals known to exist in air and water that were now accumulating in human bodies, i.e. body pollution (Body Pollution, Chemical Toxicity 2007). This was shocking news at the time and likely caused quite a stir in people who up until then likely could not have conceived that chemicals from products such as perfume and hairspray could possibly harm their bodies.

Miller suggests we apply the principles of sustainability to our endeavor to eliminate environmental hazards such as by shifting to renewable energy and resources in order to reduce pollution produced by coal manufacturing (Miller 2012, 462). I realize that biomass at a large scale is environmentally adverse; however, outdoor household biomass use has so much potential and is more efficient than charcoal. I think people are skeptical of biomass because it often involves clear cutting; however, small scale biomass can be created simply from animal and wood waste. An Environmental News Network article titled “New Biomass Plant to Cut Simon Fraser University Greenhouse Gases by Two-Thirds” describes a recent project conducted by the university a few years ago to “divert wood waste from the landfill and help reduce greenhouse gasses at the University by implementing the biomass into the heating plant (ENN 2017). Biomass from wood waste not only creates no new waste, but it also reduces existing waste. In addition, it is completely reliable, renewable, and free and should be implemented more in our strive for carbon neutrality.

Miller’s Chapter 21: Solid and Hazardous Waste discusses what solid and hazardous waste are, their effects, and how we should address and manage them (Miller 2012, 558). Solid waste includes anything solid that we throw away such as industrial solid waste from mining, farming, and manufacturing processes (558). The PowerPoint explains how, despite the ways in which the “industrial, medical, and green revolutions” have vastly improved human life, they have also created new humanly caused/influenced waste pollution, environmental hazards, and public health issues through their linear-high output systems” which are highly polluting and devoid of any biomimicry methodology, to be discussed later (Prof’s PowerPoint). Another example is municipal solid waste or, general household trash. Lastly, hazardous waste such as medical waste and pesticides is harmful to health. There are two major kinds of hazardous waste, organic compounds like PCBs and pesticides and non-degradable toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury (Miller 2012, 559). The UN Environmental Program estimates that more-developed countries output approximately 85% of hazardous waste, with the United States as the greatest producer due to its military and chemical/mining industries, followed by China (Miller 2012, 559).

We essentially have two options when it comes to addressing solid waste, the first is waste management that involves the controlling of waste to reduce environmental impacts without significantly reducing the waste being produced (561). The second option is waste reduction which generally involves a significant reduction accompanied by more intense reusing, recycling, and/or composing methods (Miller 2012, 561). In response to Miller’s Critical Thinking Question #9 on page 579, if I had to select the three most important components to deal with solid waste it would be (1) Significant waste reduction accomplished through methods such as biodegradable packaging, (2) Banning all unnecessary single use products such as Styrofoam cups and plastic bags accompanied by taxation on paper bags to encourage reusable bag use, (3) Imitation of Curitiba, Brazil’s trash collecting program, Camibo Verde which compensates people for collecting and bringing trash to one of the many collection sites throughout the city in exchange for things like fresh produce and bus tokens. With respect to hazardous waste, I would implement taxes on excessive hazardous waste such as PCB’s. I would also ban pesticides that are not made out of wholesome and environmentally conscious materials and provide monetary incentives for farms that adopt natural pesticide methods such as bio-solarization which uses solar energy to manage pests by laying a tarp over soil to trap heat which effectively makes the soil inhospitable for most pests thus eliminating the need for harmful pesticides.

In Chapter 21 Miller defines biomimicry as the heart of the three principles of sustainability and “the science and art of discovering and using natural principles to help solve human problems” (Miller 2012, 581). It consists of two actions, (1) Observation of environmental changes and ”how natural systems have responded to such changing conditions over many millions of years,” (2) Mimicry of these responses and implementing them into human systems to aid us in addressing current environmental issues (581). A relevant case of this is the food web which “serves as a natural model for responding to the growing problem of these wastes” (581). Janine Benyus elaborates on this in her Ted Talk titled “biomimicry in action” where she discusses how important it is that we look to nature for answers to our design issues. She uses the example of spring and the deeply intricate timing and coordination involved in how it is designed (Benyus 2009). Another example she relies on are wasps’ nests which are so architecturally sound that they seem almost human-made. Moreover, Cradle to Cradle Design “is a biomimetic approach to the design of products and systems that models human industry on nature’s processes viewing materials as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms” (Wikipedia 2019). This approach tasks industry with the responsibility of preserving ecosystems and simultaneously managing the circulation of organic nutrients in a productive and sustainable way. The article suggests that Cradle to Cradle design can be implemented by virtually any industrial system, big or small, such as the Chinese Government’s construction of Huangbaiyu City that was rooted in Cradle to Cradle design methodology such as by converting rooftops into locations for small, vertical farms (Wikipedia 2019).

Word Count: 1837

Discussion Question: What do you think we have yet to find a sustainable waste management system, given what we know about the effects of landfills, mostly having to do with methane emissions?

Work Cited

Miller, Tyler G., and Scott Spoolman. "Chapter 17: Environmental Hazards and Human Health." Edited by Scott Spoolman. InLiving in the Environment. 17th ed. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012.

Van Buren, Edward. “Prof’s PowerPoint Notes.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKbjVLpnX0RMjVGYUwwZlBXa28/view

Miller, Tyler G., and Scott Spoolman. "Chapter 21: Solid and Hazardous Waste." Edited by Scott Spoolman. In Living in the Environment. 17th ed. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012.

Benyus, Janine. "Biomimicry in Action." TED. July 2009. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action#t-29010.

"Cradle-to-Cradle Design." Wikipedia. April 03, 2019. Accessed April 02, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle-to-cradle_design.

Body Pollution, Chemical Toxicity. Body Pollution, Chemical Toxicity. June 12, 2007. Accessed April 2, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JZPNmkV3zE.

United States. Executive Office. President's Cancer Panel, 2008-2009 Annual Report. 2009. Accessed April 2, 2019. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKbjVLpnX0RelBIVmVUOTl2SUU/view.

"New Biomass Plant to Cut Simon Fraser University's Greenhouse Gases by Two-thirds." Environmental News Network. October 17, 2017. Accessed April 02, 2019. https://www.enn.com/component/content/article?id=52858:new-biomass-plant-to-cut-simon-fraser-university&Itemid=151#39;s-greenhouse-gases-by-two-thirds&catid=8.

"Our Malaria World Map of Estimated Risk." Treated.com UK. Accessed May 02, 2019. https://www.treated.com/malaria/world-map-risk.

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esonetwork · 4 years

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Timestamp #200: The Unicorn and the Wasp

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/timestamp-200-the-unicorn-and-the-wasp/

Timestamp #200: The Unicorn and the Wasp

Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp (1 episode, s04e07, 2008)

The mystery meets the mystery writer.

The TARDIS materializes to the scent of mint and lemonade in the air. If the vintage car in the drive is any indication, it’s the 1920s and Donna’s excited to attend a party with Professor Peach, Reverend Golightly, and the butler Greeves. The Doctor produces his psychic paper, meaning that invitations are all taken care of.

Unfortunately, the party will be one short Professor Peach falls victim to the lead pipe in the library. The suspect is a giant wasp.

The Doctor and Donna are greeted at the party by Lady Clemency Eddison. They also meet Colonel Hugh Curbishley (Lady Eddison’s husband), their son Roger (who flirts with Davenport, a servant), Reverend Golightly, socialite Robina Redmond, Miss Chandrakala, and the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie.

It’s a regular game of Clue.

The Doctor notes the date of the newspaper: It’s the day of Agatha Christie’s disappearance. Her car will be found abandoned and she’ll resurface ten days later with no memory. Her husband has recently cheated on her, but she’s maintaining a stiff upper lip.

Meanwhile, Miss Chandrakala finds Professor Peach, and the Doctor stands in as a police officer with a plucky assistant to boot. The Doctor finds alien residue – Donna’s beside herself that Charles Dickens was actually surrounded by ghosts at Christmas – then teams up with Christie to question the guests while Donna looks about with a magnifying glass from the Doctor’s endless pockets.

Each of the guests has an extraordinary story of where they were at the time of the murder, but there are no alibis. Each is hiding something except for the reverend. The Doctor asks Christie about the paper she picked up from the murder scene, and together they discover the word “maiden” on it.

Upstairs, Donna finds an empty bedroom. Greeves informs her that Lady Eddison has kept the room shut for the last 40 years, after spending six months in it recovering from malaria following her return from India. Inside, Donna finds nothing but a teddy bear and a giant murderous wasp. She attacks it with the magnifying glass and the power of the sun, and the Doctor and Christie arrive to sample the stinger that it left behind.

Miss Chandrakala is murdered by a falling statue. When the Doctor, Donna, and Christie find her, the wasp attacks, but the Doctor cannot find it after it flies off. The guests convene in a sitting room and talk through the events with Christie, but she’s discouraged because she doesn’t know what’s going on. All they have is the clue in Miss Chandrakala’s dying words: “The poor little child…”

Later, she confides in Donna that she feels like the events are mocking her. They commune over lost loves before finding a box in a crushed flowerbed. The Doctor, Donna, and Christie examine the as Greeves brings refreshments, but the Doctor soon realizes that he’s been poisoned by cyanide. A short comedic scene later – complete with ginger beer, walnuts, anchovies, and a shocking kiss from Donna – and the Doctor has detoxed.

The cast gather for dinner, which the Doctor has laced with pepper to test each guest to see if they are the wasp. The lights go out, the wasp appears, and Roger is dead after being stung in the back. Greeves is cleared by being in plain sight during the murder, but Lady Eddison’s necklace (the “Firestone”, a priceless gem from India) is missing.

The Doctor encourages Christie to solve it, knowing that she has the ability. Christie works her way around the assembled guests, uncovering Robina as a thief known as the Unicorn. The Firestone is recovered, but the murderer is still at large.

Christie further (accidentally) uncovers that Colonel Curbishley has been faking his wheelchair-bound disability in order to keep his wife’s affections. She also discovers that Lady Eddison came home from India pregnant, with Miss Chandrakala as a maid and confidante, and had to seclude herself to hide the scandal and the shame.

But, as the Doctor discovers, her tryst was with a vespiform visitor from another world. The alien gave her the jewel and a child, who was taken to an orphanage, and whose identity was uncovered by Professor Peach since “maiden” led to “maiden name”. The Doctor works his way around the room, landing on the reverend who had recently thwarted a robbery in his church. He also notes that the reverend is forty years old, and pieces together that Golightly’s anger broke the genetic lock that kept him in human form. Golightly activated, and the jewel – a telepathic recorder – connected mother and son, including the works of Agatha Christie since Lady Eddison was reading her favorite, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The reverend transforms in rage, and Christie leads the wasp away with the Firestone, believing that this whole thing is her fault. The Doctor and Donna pursue Christie to the nearby lake, realizing that the two are linked. Donna seizes the jewel and throws it into the lake. The wasp follows and drowns, and while the Doctor is aghast at its death, the three of them are relieved that the mystery is solved. Before the wasp dies, it releases Christie from the psychic connection, and the Doctor puts history in motion: The events of the night are erased from her mind and the mystery writer turns up ten days later Harrogate Hotel courtesy of the TARDIS.

The Doctor consoles Donna about the adventure, showing her that Agatha Christie’s memory lived on. She got married again, wrote about Miss Marple and Murder on the Orient Express (which Donna had mentioned during the night’s events), and even published a story about a giant wasp. The last one – Death in the Clouds, filed away after Cybermen and Carrionites – was reprinted in the year five billion, making Agatha Christie the most popular writer of all time.

Donna reminds the Doctor that Christie never thought that her work was any good. He replies simply:

Well, no one knows how they’re going to be remembered. All we can do is hope for the best. Maybe that’s what kept her writing. Same thing keeps me traveling.

With that, they fly onwards to the next adventure.

This story was a rapid-fire mystery, and the power of the acting mixed with the pace kept it entertaining throughout. Fenella Woolgar’s turn as Agatha Christie was well done, mixing her intellect and modesty about her craft with the pain and tragedy of her husband’s betrayal. I particularly liked Christie’s gradual awakening to the Doctor’s alien nature, best evidenced in the scenes where they interrogated the guests using each other’s strengths to unravel the mystery.

Combine that with the chemistry between Tennant and Tate bulldozing through a game of Clue and you have a rather entertaining (if not bloody) dinner party.

The final words that the Doctor uses to summarize his ethos remind me of quote from a recent episode of Outlander. While discussing last words and legacies, a certain character (whose identity I’ll not spoil for fans who haven’t seen the episode yet) said this:

I’d say let history forget my name, so long as my words and my deeds are remembered by those I love.

It doesn’t matter if anyone remembers my name so long as my life made an impact on the people who meant something to me.

Life lessons from the Doctor. Words and ideas to live by.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Silence in the Library and Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

#Doctor Who #Tenth Doctor #Timestamps Project

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how2to18 · 6 years

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ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER — the famed Yiddish writer who in 1935 moved from Warsaw to New York and in 1978 received the Nobel Prize for Literature as an American-Jewish author — made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955, arriving just after Yom Kippur and leaving about two months later. His relationship to Israel was complicated to say the least. He had been born into a strictly religious family of rabbis and rebetzins in Poland, for whom the land of Israel was the holiest of religious symbols. But he also lived a secular life in 1920s Warsaw, witnessing Zionism overtake Jewish Enlightenment and Bundism as a viable 20th-century political force. In more personal terms, Israel was also the place to which his son, Israel Zamir, had been brought by his mother, Runya Pontsch, in 1938, growing up in part on Kibbutz Beit Alpha and later fighting in the War of Independence. Yet Singer had always avoided every kind of -ism — from Zionism to communism — and so his perspective on the young state of Israel was largely free of the ideology and dogmatism that was prevalent during the country’s early days.

During his trip, Singer published several articles per week in the Yiddish daily Forverts, recording his visit. While these articles sometimes read like touristic travelogues, they reflect Singer’s complex relation to the land of Israel, as both an idea and a place. Israel had been in Singer’s consciousness since his youngest days as a boy growing up in religious surroundings, and it made its way into his work, including some of his earliest fiction, which was published in Hebrew. When he was still living in Warsaw, Singer wrote a novella titled The Way Back (1928) about a young man full of the Zionist dream who travels to the Land of Israel and returns five years later after suffering hunger, malaria, and poverty. In 1948, just a week before the state of Israel was declared, he ended The Family Moskat with several characters leaving Warsaw and moving to pursue the Zionist dream. In 1955, just weeks before his trip, he published an episode of In My Father’s Court (1956) titled “To the Land of Israel,” about a local tinsmith who moves his family to the Holy Land, then returns disappointed to Warsaw, but then, despite everything, goes back. In his memoirs, Singer writes that he considered moving to British Mandate Palestine in the mid-1920s, and in The Certificate (1967), he fictionalizes this in a tale that ends with the protagonist instead going back to his shtetl. As late as 1938, in a letter to Runya sent from New York, he was still fantasizing about the idea: “My plan is this: as soon as I have least resources, and I hope they come together quickly, I will travel to Palestine.” But by mid-1939, these dreams seem to pass into a different view on reality: “For me, in the meantime, getting a visa to Palestine is impossible.” For Singer, it seems, Israel remained, in both the symbolic and literal sense, the road not taken.

And yet, in late 1955, Singer made his first trip to Israel, accompanied by his wife Alma, on a ship called Artsa traveling from Marseille via Naples to the port of Haifa — not as a religious child or an idealistic young man but as a middle-aged Yiddish writer who was beginning to make his name on the American literary landscape. And his journalistic assignment was to capture the trip in short articles that would give Yiddish readers across the United States a sense of what the young state of Israel was like. His son, Zamir, was in New York working as a Shomer Ha’Tsair representative, and both letters and memoirs suggest there was no question of his meeting Runya. Singer was left to his own devices — traveling throughout Israel with Alma, but writing about it as if he were there all by himself.

Singer’s peculiar perspective — with such complex personal history behind it, and such pragmatic goals before it — gives his writing from Israel its unique tone. It is always concerned with the big picture yet remains focused on the small picture. This is evident from the first moments of his trip, even while he was still on the ship. “I think about Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and the sacrifices he made to set his eyes on the Holy Land,” he writes while the ship sails from France to Italy. “I think about the first pioneers, the first builders of the New Yishuv […] How is it that there’s no trace of any of this on this ship? Are Jews no longer devoted with heart and soul to the idea of the Land of Israel?” Singer is looking for proof of the spiritual greatness that the Land of Israel represents, and he wants to see it in the people on board with him — but he soon comes to understand that Israel is not a place of imagination, it’s a place that actually exists. “No, things are not all that bad,” he writes. “The fire is there, but is hidden […] The Land of Israel has become a reality, part of everyday life.”

He begins a keen description of reality still on board the ship. Observing the younger passengers, he describes a now familiar picture: “The young men and women who sit under my window on folding lounge chairs have possibly fought in the war against the Arabs. Tomorrow they may be sent to Gaza or another strategically significant location. But at the moment they want what any other modern young people want: to have a good time.” He identifies, before even arriving on shore, the constant negotiation in Israeli society between war and freedom.

On the ship, he also identifies cultural tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, religious and secular:

There’s a tiny shul here with a holy ark and a few prayer books lying around. But the only people praying there are Sephardic Jews who are traveling in third class or in the dormitories […] It will soon be Yom Kippur, but the ship’s “Chaplain” […] told me there are only three Ashkenazim who want to pray in a quorum.

Singer becomes attached to this group of Sephardi Jews from Tunisia, following them with his eyes and ears:

On Friday evening I wanted to attend prayers. It was still daytime. I went into the little shul and there I saw a kiddush cup with a little wine left inside, and a few pieces of challah laying nearby. It seemed that they had already brought in the Sabbath. The Tunisian Jews have to eat at 6 o’clock and need to pray first.

Later, he goes again, and sees a man praying in a way that moves him. “There, in that little shul, I first came upon the spirituality for which I searched. There, among those Jews, it felt like shivat tsion — the Return to Zion.” He later watches the young Tunisian Jewish women with their head coverings down on the lower deck.

I look for the commonalities between me and them. It seems to me that they, too, look at me to see what connects us. From the standpoint of our bodies, we are built as differently as two people can be […] But as far as one may be from the other, the roots are the same […] There, in Tunisia, they looked Jewish, and for this they were persecuted.

What binds Jews from different corners of the world together, it seems, is their separate but shared experience of difference, even in their native countries.

Singer reports that the mood changes in Naples, where several hundred more passengers board the ship. Now there’s also singing and yelling — the fire he was looking for. But during this part of the trip he also meets a German-Jewish couple who complain bitterly about their life in the Yishuv.

The husband said that letting the Oriental Jews in without any selection, without any inspection, had completely thrown off the moral balance of the country […] The wife went even further than the husband. She said that, no matter how much she wished, she could not stand the company of Polish and Russian Jews. She was accustomed to European (German) culture […] she could not stand the Eastern European Jews.

Singer pushes back against her snobbery. “‘You know,’ I asked her, ‘that your so-called European culture slaughtered 6 million Jews?’” And she responds: “I know everything. But…”

Before he even sets foot in Israel, Singer identifies some of the social difficulties that its citizens face. “It’s hard, very hard, to bring together and bind together a people who are as far from each other as east from west […] Holding the Modern Jew together means holding together powers that can at each moment come apart. Herein lies the problem of the Yishuv.” This observation is less a criticism than a diagnosis. No matter how much binds Jews in Israel — the roots we all share — we have to, at the same time, navigate our differences. In this, Singer acknowledges one of the greatest challenges of a Jewish state.

What seems to really strike Singer when he finally arrives in Israel is the reality that, while built on modern organizational foundations established since the mid-19th century, the country appears as if it had been constructed out of nothing. His access to this reality is, funnily enough, street signs:

Israel is a new country, there’s a mixed population, for the most part newcomers, and they need information at every step. Signs in Hebrew — and often also in English — show you everything you need to know. […] The signs don’t just offer information, they’re also full of associations. . . Every street is named for someone who played a role in Jewish history or culture. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Gvirol, J. L. Gordon, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, Pinsker, Herzl, Frishman, Zeitlin are all part of this place’s geography. Words from the Pentateuch, from the Mishnah, from the commentaries, from the Gemara, from the Zohar, from books of the Jewish Enlightenment – are used for all kinds of commercial, industrial, and political slogans.

What Singer seems to like about this is that it makes even less sympathetic Jews have to face their connection to Jewish history and culture. “The German Jew who lives here might be, in his heart, a bit of a snob […] but his address is: Sholem Aleichem Street. And he must — ten times or a hundred times a day — repeat this very same name.” In these signs, Singer sees something that goes much deeper into the reality and paradox of Jewish identity: its apparent inescapability.

Singer quickly connects these prosaic thoughts with the very core of Jewish faith: “As it once did at Mount Sinai, Jewish culture — in the best sense of the word — has brought itself down upon the Jews of Israel and called to them: you must take me on, you can no longer ignore me, you can no longer hide me along with yourself.” In Israel, spirit and religion are not ephemeral feelings; they are viscerally present.

On his way from the port in Haifa to Tel Aviv, Singer stops at a Ma’abara, or transit camp, set up to house hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees, mainly recent arrivals from Arabic-speaking countries across North Africa and the Middle East. “It’s true that the little houses are far from comfortable,” he writes.

This is a camp of poor people, those who have not yet integrated into the Yishuv. But the place is ruled by a spirit of freedom and Jewish hopefulness. Sephardic Jews with long sidelocks walk around in turbans, linen robes, sandals, ritual fringes. There’s a little market where they sell tomatoes, pomegranates, grapes, bread, buns, cheese […] It’s true that there are no baths here or other such comforts. But the writer of these lines and our readers were also not all raised in houses with baths.

The poverty in these camps does not alienate someone like Singer, who himself grew up in poverty.

Singer recognizes both the desperation and the potential in these refugee camps:

The Jews here look both hopeful and angry. They have plenty of complaints for the leaders of Israel. But they’re busy with their own lives. Someone is thinking about them in the Jewish ministries. Their children study in Jewish schools. They are already part of the people. They will themselves soon sit in offices, speak in the Knesset.

It is as if Singer could see the long and difficult road ahead of someone like Yossi Yona — the academic scholar and Labor Party politician who was born in the Ma’abara of Kiryat Ata and now sits in the Knesset.

At every step, Singer reflects on his relationship to the reality of being in the modern Jewish state: “Moses, our great teacher, did not merit coming here. Herzl did not have the luck to see his dream realized. But I, who laid not a single finger toward building this state, walk around like I own the place.” His focus, at this early point of the trip, is mainly on the unbelievability of Jewish sovereignty. The question of its sustainability — the role of Palestinian Arabs within this project and the constant threat of war — is still to come. In the meantime, Singer basks in what he sees as the Jewishness around him: the history and culture with which he grew up, persecuted for hundreds of years in Eastern Europe, had finally risen and come to reign over an entire land and people. This unimaginable reality leads him to focus not on Israel’s relations with other people or states — its Arab population, the Palestinian refugees, the enemy nations across its borders — but rather on Israel’s national relationship to itself.

“There cannot be a Kibbutz Galuyot — an ingathering of the exiles — without the highest tolerance,” he warns.

Everyone in this place has to be accepted: the most orthodox Jews and the greatest apostates; the blonde and the dark-haired, the ingenue and the pioneeress, the Russian baryshnya, the American miss, and the French mademoiselle, the rabbinical Jewish daughters, and the wives that wear wigs with silk bands, and even the German Jewish fraulein who complains that Jews stink and that she misses the mortal danger of German culture.

This sentence is perhaps difficult to swallow today, and yet the divisions in Israeli society have only grown since Singer wrote this over 60 years ago. He could not have known the place that the Ultra-Orthodox would occupy in today’s Israel, or the great split in public opinion that would develop over territories occupied in the Six-Day War, or the strong shift to the right that the Israeli population has exhibited since the late 1970s. What he saw before him were Jews from different backgrounds, in different attire, with different beliefs and convictions, all living together in a single country. He immediately realized that, without tolerance for one another, the project would be doomed from the beginning.

It is worth scrutinizing this thought. Israeli society must deal fairly with others, but Israelis must also find a way of dealing fairly with each other. Respect for the unfamiliar begins with respect for the familiar — with the ability to see oneself in other people, and others in oneself. Where anger, destruction, and violence rule, they do so both inwardly and outwardly. If Jews cannot be good to Jews, this seems to suggest, how could they ever be good to anyone else?

In his writing on Israel, Singer also constantly contemplates religious history and personal experience. In this spirit, he writes: “Ahavat Israel, loving fellow Jews […] has a mystical significance.” Singer cannot avoid associating the place with his own religious education as a child — being a Jew in Israel also means, for him, being constantly in touch with the myriad of Jewish texts he has internalized.

Standing at the foot of Mount Gilboa, he writes:

This was where Saul fell, this was where the last act of a divine drama was played out. Not far from here the Witch of Endor, the spiritist of the past, bewitched Samuel the Prophet. I look at this very same rocky hump which was seen by the first Jewish king, who had made the first big Jewish mistake: underestimating the powers and evil of Amalek.

Looking out from the balcony of a hotel in Safed a few days later, likely at Mount Meron, he writes: “This is not a mountain for tourists, or runaway fugitives, but for Kabbalists, who made their accounting with our little world. There, through those mountains, one can cross from this world into the world to come.” He continues:

At this very mountain gazed the holy Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria], Rabbi Chaim Vital, the Baal-Ha’Kharedim [Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri], and the author of Lekha Dodi [Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz]. Here, in this place, an angel showed itself each night to Rabbi Joseph Karo [author of the Shulkhan Arukh] and conducted nightly conversations with him. The greatest redemption-seekers looked out from this place for the Messiah. Here, in a tent or a sukkah, deeply gentle souls dreamed about a world of peace and a humanity with one purpose: to worship God, to become absorbed in the divine spirit, in a spirit of holiness, of beauty. This is where the Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria] composed his Sabbath poetry, which was full of divine eroticism, and which had a depth with no equal in the poetry of the world.

In visiting Mount Zion, he similarly finds himself transported to a mystical past:

I look into a cave where you can supposedly find King David’s grave. I walk on small stone steps that lead to a room where, according to Christian legend, Jesus ate his last meal. […] This is another sort of antiquity than in other places. The antiquity here smells — it seems to me — of the Temple Mount, of Torah, of scrolls, of prophecy.

And elsewhere: “On this very hill there started a spiritual experiment that continues to this very day. In this place, a people tried to lead a divine life on earth. From here there will one day shine a light to the people of the world and to our own people.” And it seems that his sense of moral choice, raised by the danger of Jordanian soldiers looking down on him from the wall above, also finds expression: “What is today a desert could tomorrow become a town, and what today is a town could tomorrow become a desert. It all depends on our actions, not on bricks, stones, or strategies.” Walking through the Valley of Hinom, the historical site of Gehenna which he finds covered in greenery, he even jokes: “If the real Gehenna looked anything like this, sinning wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.” The images and symbolism of the Bible are truly present at every step.

The land as a whole has a strong effect on Singer, but his trip to Safed, as someone raised on the Kabbalah, made an especially strong impression. “I can say that here, for the first time, I gave myself over to the sense that I was in the Land of Israel.” These are moments when Singer’s sense of criticism, doubt, heresy, intellectuality, and all the other complex impulses that find their way into his fiction, takes second place to a deep sense of piety and faith. This is no less powerful in his work, where his characters achieve it rarely or partially, and, even when they do, with great difficulty.

Singer doesn’t come to this spiritual journal easily either. In Safed, he also encounters the reality of the new state. There he meets a Jew who speaks Galician Yiddish, but who is part of generations of Safed residents. “The Arabs of the past were good to Jews,” Singer quotes the man.

They let the Jewish merchants earn a living. When you bought grapes from them, they would add an extra bunch. Another man said: everything was good until the English came. They incited the Arabs against the Jews. Another man said: Well, may there soon be peace. This is atkhalta d’geula — the beginning of the redemption.

Among the mysticism and magic of the place are politics, colonialism, and history.

Later, in Tel Aviv, Singer visits a courthouse. In the first courtroom, Singer sees “a young man from Iraq who had allegedly falsified his documents in order not to have to go to the army.” In the next courtroom, a Greek Orthodox priest is taking the stand, speaking Arabic, which is being interpreted into Hebrew:

On the bench sit several Arabs […] They are suing to get back their houses, which the state of Israel took over after the Jewish-Arab War […] Jews have taken over their homes. But now the Arabs have decided to sue for their property back. They no longer have any documents, but they are bringing witnesses to testify that the houses that they own belong to them. The old Greek priest is one of these witnesses.

In a third courtroom, Singer observes a Yemenite Jewish thief who is accused of assaulting the police, but who claims the police actually assaulted him. The young thief ends up being acquitted. Ashkenazi Jews are conspicuously absent from this entire visit to the courthouse.

Singer soon observes other forms of suffering and injustice. On the southern side of the city, it is even more evident:

Here in Jaffa you can see that there was a war in this country. Tens and possibly hundreds of houses are shot up, ruined […] The majority of Arabs fled Jaffa, and in the Arab apartments live Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia. They live in single rooms almost without furniture. They cook on portable burners. […] The situation in Israel is generally difficult, but in Jaffa everything is laid bare — all the poverty, all the difficulty.

Singer is, as that passage and most of his writing suggests, almost singularly focused on the new Jewish population of the state. The former Arab tenants of these apartment buildings remain invisible to him.

Singer is so utterly focused on the creation of the new state and the new Jewish settlers, that even when faced with the Arabic population, he barely acknowledges them. He writes, “In Beer Sheva, more than in other cities, you feel that you’re among Arabs. […] Arabs are not black but also not white. […] What sticks out to the eye most is the great amount of clothing that Arabs wear on the hottest of days. […] Rarely do you see Arab women on the street.” What is striking is the degree to which Singer sees Israel’s Arab population as an impenetrable other. He seeks no interaction with them, no attempt to understand them. He puts it plainly in another text: he just wants them to let Jews live their lives. Later, when he visits Jaffa, he writes: “As long as the Arabs leave well alone, there will be building-fever here like in Tel Aviv and in the rest of the country.” This is a difficult opinion to hear, but it has actually come to bear. Jaffa, more than 60 years later, is now going through a major revolution of gentrifying Jewish construction.

There is no doubt that Singer’s story of Israel is a Jewish story. His writing can deepen our understanding of different kinds of Jewish realities, even if, when it comes to Palestinians, his opinions are thoroughly unexamined and unconsidered. Singer can contribute, however, an interesting perspective on the need for tolerance among different kinds of Jews: Sephardic, Ashkenazi, old world and new. This is especially the case when it comes to modern Jews understanding the mindset of the old world. And it sets out a path for tolerance that can then be extended beyond Israel’s Jewish population.

“I myself want people to speak to me in Hebrew,” Singer writes in one of his earlier articles.

But as soon as anyone hears that my Hebrew sounds foreign, they start speaking to me in Yiddish, and so the result is that I mostly speak Yiddish. People here speak Yiddish at every step. […] Even Sephardim learn some Yiddish in the army. It’s also in fashion for Hebraists to throw in Yiddish words to be cute.

Over and over, Singer’s wishes and imaginings of this place bump up against the reality. Everyday life — the texture of daily reality — pushes back against the big questions that seem to always be at hand. “A good cup of coffee is rare,” Singer writes. “You can get a good black coffee, but if you like a cup of coffee with cream like in New York, you will mostly be disappointed.” He also points out that “yogurt is very popular, as is a sort of sour cream called lebenya.” And another thing: “You see balconies everywhere. People sit on their balconies, eat on their balconies, entertain guests.” He points out that there are many elegant people on the streets but that well-dressed people are a rare sight. He even spends a paragraph on trisim, the heavy shades that are meant to keep out the Mediterranean sun. No matter the history, there is always real life to negotiate.

A major part of this real life, as Singer points out, is the constant threat of war. “The enemy can attack from all sides: from north, from south, from east,” Singer writes, reflecting on his trip up to Kibbutz Beit Alpha. “But the visitor in Israel is infected with a mysterious bravery that belongs to all Jews in Israel. A kind of courage that’s difficult to explain.” On Tel Aviv, he writes: “The enemy is not far. If you in New York were as close to the enemy as we are here, you’d shiver and shake and try to run away. But in the streets where I find myself there reigns a strange quiet, a serenity having something to do with the physical and spiritual atmosphere.” In Jerusalem, he again has the same thought: “It’s hard to believe that you’re close, extremely close, to the enemy.” And on the way up to Mount Zion, he again points to the mysterious courage: “I’m no hero, but I have no fear. I’d would say that Israel is infected with bravery. In any other country, this kind of walk, next to the very border of the enemy, would arouse fear in me.” Violence is a reality that Israelis face at all times — and there is no doubt that over the decades it has affected and perhaps also infected our society, both how Israelis treat non-Jews and how we treat each other. But the fact remains that, to live here, we all need an inherent kind of bravery, toward outside threats no less than our own neighbors.

In one of his articles, in which Singer considers all the people he met during his trip, he tells the story of Benjamin Warszawiak, an old friend from Bilgoraj who moved to Israel. Benjamin found life difficult, moved for a time to South America, but eventually came back to live out his life working on a kibbutz. His story is sad, and yet Singer sees a redemptive aspect to this man’s life — that there is nowhere else but the Jewish state for him to live. “You don’t have to necessarily be an extraordinary person to have deep spiritual needs,” he reflects. “Simple people often sacrifice their personal happiness to improve their spiritual atmosphere. Israel is full of such people, and you find them especially in the kibbutzim. I can say that almost all of the kibbutzniks are in their own way idealists.”

Ultimately, Singer suggests, the paradox of Jewish life in Israel lies in the heart of the Jews who continue to make Israel their home. “Faith in this place, like the Sabbath, is somewhat automatic and instinctual too,” he writes. “The mouth denies, but the heart believes. How could people live here otherwise?”

David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem.

The post Faith in Place: Isaac Bashevis Singer in Israel appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Two Years After KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?

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Two Years After KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?

In March 2012, a human rights organization’s documentary about a central African despot became the most viral video of all time, and the ensuing furor resulted in its leader’s bizarre public meltdown. On the second anniversary of the phenomenon, everyone involved is still figuring out what it all means.

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Jason Russell in his office in September. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Jason Russell is tan. Genuinely and exotically tan, even for a lifelong Southern Californian. He almost immediately apologizes for it, explaining that he’s just come from a wedding in Turks and Caicos. Later that afternoon, he’ll walk through the Barrio Logan, San Diego, headquarters of his nonprofit Invisible Children, burnt and barefoot in a neon orange tank top and shorts, rain whipping the office’s industrial windows. The interns will giggle, fondly: “That’s a guy who takes his workout seriously.”

This is Jason Russell today — 35, training for an Ironman, home every night by 6 p.m., never away from his family for longer than five days a month. This is not the raving man of two years ago, stomping down a San Diego sidewalk, slapping the cement with his bare ass to the sky. But part of him is here too.

“Every day for two minutes, I will think, Oh my god, I had a naked meltdown,” Russell says, stretching and snapping a rubber band between his fingers on his glass desk. “I will think that and be like, how did that happen? How in the world is that a part of my story and history forever?”

Russell today is healthy, or says he is. He went to therapy. He was on Oprah’s Next Chapter. He’s still theatrical and jovial, still prone to hyperbole, still enthusiastically earnest in a way that’s completely inspiring to half the world and nails on a chalkboard to the other. But after Russell’s psychotic episode, he spent six months figuring out who he was going to be, how and when and whether he would return to the nonprofit he founded in 2004 and nearly brought down in 2012 with the release of “KONY 2012,” the most viral video of all time — an impassioned, idealistic call for American youth to make Joseph Kony, the leader of central Africa’s militant child-kidnapping group Lord’s Resistance Army, in Russell’s words, “famous.”

For a majority of the 100 million who viewed “KONY 2012,” it was the first time they’d heard of Invisible Children, then an eight-year-old organization with a website that couldn’t handle its new traffic. Information gathering was a free-for-all; here was Jason Russell, the video’s narrator, describing Invisible Children as “the Pixar of human rights stories” to the New York Times. There he was telling CNN, “We are not these other organizations that do amazing work on the ground. If you want to fund a cow or you want to help someone in a village in that component, you can do that. That’s a third of what we do.” Here was a fairly embarrassing musical promotional video for a 2006 event called the Global Night Commute. There was Russell describing his personality: “If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby.” Here was an appearance on The 700 Club, an interview at Liberty University, and an audio clip of Russell at a Christian conference describing Invisible Children as a “Trojan Horse in a sense, going into a secular realm.” And everywhere was the photo of Invisible Children’s founders posing with tough faces, guns, and members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

The ammunition was boundless and critics ruthless. Counterprogramming was one thing, but character assassination was another, prompting Time magazine’s Alex Perry to describe much of the backlash as “malicious online ‘takedown,’ most of whose participants were utterly uninterested in truth but focused instead on a point-scoring, trashing and hurting, the digital pogrom of the unaccountable, anonymous Invisible Mob.”

“I think that’s what really made me lose it,” Russell says. “They were attacking me personally: my voice, my hair, my face, my family, my friends … I didn’t realize what 15 minutes of white-hot fame looks like. And I got to see it. And it is not pretty.

“It’s” — he knocks on his desk — “not” — knock — “good” — knock. “It’s so dark. I was obviously not sleeping and definitely kind of losing my mind, for sure, but I would seriously start crying when I thought about, like, Lindsay Lohan, or even Sarah Palin, or these people who’ve been in the spotlight and been ridiculed by everyone in the world. Most people will say out of their mouths, ‘Lindsay Lohan should die.’ And then I was reading that about myself.”

After 10 days, it was reportedly “extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration” that drove Russell to that San Diego sidewalk, and later a hospital on a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold order. A week later, his wife Danica announced the early diagnosis was “brief reactive psychosis.”

And then the conversation stopped — and with it, all the debate, conspiracy theories, and think pieces about Invisible Children’s methods and motivations. Some threads continued, of course, but it was as if the media saw Russell’s breakdown and slowly backed out of the room, switching off the lights before comically bolting away.

Russell was marked, even after his recovery tour. The organization was marked too. And yet they both have endured, largely off the millions KONY 2012 brought in, but also because of significant changes made in response to KONY 2012, and a desperately sustained belief that the LRA’s end is near — a belief motivated by the fear that if it’s not, theirs may come first.

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David Ocitti, a former child soldier from Uganda. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Eight years before KONY 2012, there was Invisible Children: Rough Cut, the documentary Russell made after graduating from film school. Russell and his friends Laren Poole, then 19, and Bobby Bailey, then 20, spent months saving money and petitioning family and friends, and their floppy-haired origin story has been told and told again: “All we really wanted, more than anything, was a compelling story,” Russell says. They found one — plus a few bouts of malaria.

Rough Cut focuses on “night walkers,�� or rural Northern Uganda children who used to walk into town each night to sleep in public and avoid capture by the LRA. It largely follows one former child soldier, Jacob Acaye, who watched his brother die after the boy tried to escape.

“We wanted to go to Sundance and be the documentary darlings. And Sundance shut us down,” Russell says. “In a way, we were like, ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ Sundance.’ I’ve been [there] enough times to know that even if there are great movies there, they often do not get seen by more than a couple thousand people. And we felt our story was powerful and important enough that we were going to, in a way, force people to watch it.”

And so they held screenings on the West Coast, forming a charity with a mission statement to “raise awareness and [educate] the U.S. about the atrocities, exploitation and abuse of invisible children throughout the world.” According to financial documents, Invisible Children brought in $331,783 in 2004, its first year. In 2005, as screenings ramped up, the organization made more than $3 million. The founders hired a CFO, Ben Keesey, a UCLA graduate who turned down a finance job at Deloitte & Touche after a post-finals trip to Africa. The money helped take Rough Cut on a national tour in 2006 and produce Global Night Commute, a concurrent rally in 130 cities, where an estimated 80,000 Americans walked to their city centers and slept outside.

As a newly IRS-certified nonprofit in 2006, Invisible Children continued to stage dramatic events, produce short films, and host thousands of screenings, raising money through donations and selling Ugandan-made goods. Celebrities began lending support; in 2007, Invisible Children had a storyline on The CW’s Veronica Mars, starring longtime supporter Kristen Bell (and Russell’s brother-in-law Ryan Hansen). In 2007, Fall Out Boy filmed a music video in Uganda, and Invisible Children joined Warped Tour.

On paper, business was good; revenue climbed from $7 million in mid-2007 to $8.25 million in mid-2010. Program expenses were divided into essentially two pots: one for U.S.-based events, film production, lobbying, and awareness tours, and another for programs in Uganda, including scholarships, teacher exchanges, and a seamstress program for former LRA abductees. (Generally, the U.S. pot was more full than the Uganda pot, by anywhere from $50,000 to $1.7 million.)

But internally, there were growing pains. “I remember going through a couple painful periods and having to let go of friends,” co-founder Bobby Bailey says. “During the summer months, we thought, There’s no way we were going to make payroll. We were never good at reaching out to high-level donors to pay for our overhead. Most of our money came from kids buying products.”

Bailey left Invisible Children in 2009 — an emotional, messy exit that began with The Rescue, a 100-city event during which participants “abducted themselves” in an attempt to get high-profile figures to voice public support for helping child soldiers. Bailey pushed for it and raised the money, and the event got Invisible Children on Oprah’s radar. But Bailey says he was overwhelmed by the planning and implementation of the event.

“These massive events that brought out 80,000 people almost crushed us and killed us, financially but also because we worked people so hard,” he says. “To be honest, I couldn’t do it. I was tired, I felt frustrated, I was just burnt, and I couldn’t figure out how to make the event happen. It was just a big blow to me and my ego.”

“It was difficult,” goes Russell’s version. “I mean, it was just a power struggle. That’s all. He’s an amazing filmmaker and so creative. But because we’re very entrepreneurial, a lot of his ideas wouldn’t get traction. And so he was super frustrated with feeling like people wouldn’t listen to him.”

The Rescue was a turning point for Invisible Children, not only because of Bailey’s exit. The organization received substantial media attention for the first time, but also attracted its first major wave of criticism.

“My initial reaction was that it was goofy and self-serving and a disturbing over-simplification of the issues,” says Kate Cronin-Furman of the international issues blog Wronging Rights. At the time of The Rescue, she wrote (with co-blogger Amanda Taub) that “choosing to simplistically define … Ugandan children as ‘The Abducted’ constrains our ability to think creatively about the problems they face, and work with them to combat these problems.”

“The cavalier first film did the trick,” wrote Chris Blattman, then an assistant professor in political science and economics at Yale. “Maybe now it’s time to start acting like grownups.”

To Blattman, the “idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa” was “inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous … The savior attitude pervades too many aid failures, not to mention military interventions.”

Ben Keesey, who became Invisible Children’s CEO in 2007, calls this kind of criticism “low-hanging fruit.”

“Like, of course it’s detailed, nuanced, and complicated how you actually contribute responsibly to seeing an end to a conflict like the LRA,” he says. “But the statement that wherever you are in the world, however old you are, you have the ability to help end a war in Africa? I stand by that. And I think it’s the necessary statement to actually get a lot of people to do something.”

Invisible Children’s first legislative victory came in 2010, when President Obama signed the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, leading to the deployment of 100 U.S. advisers in LRA-affected areas in 2011. That year, Laren Poole left Invisible Children to move to Uganda, fundraising and strategizing for the Bridgeway Foundation, which hires private military contractors to train Uganda’s army.

“We left the Oval Office after the bill was signed, and we stayed out much too late and were drinking dirty martinis and having the best time,” Russell says. “I brought up the question, ‘What’s the dream for your life?’ It’s something I always ask people, and Laren said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And then I started laughing, because we were like, ‘Dude, you’re always so sick. You’re already 29 years old. You’re not going to be a Navy SEAL.’ And Laren is the type of person that will say, ‘Watch me.’”

The move left Russell in full control of the organization’s creative direction, which he had always fought with Bailey and Poole over. And as 2011 ended, he was bringing together a campaign that would become bigger than he — a “lifelong dreamer,” disciple of Oprah, and permanent summer camp counselor — could have anticipated.

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

“KONY 2012” went live on Monday, March 5, 2012. Noelle West, Invisible Children’s director of communications, switched the YouTube video from private to public — a fairly insignificant moment she may actually remember for the rest of her life.

“I don’t know if you’ve been in a media shitstorm, but I’ve never been, none of us had ever been, and it was the most traumatic and overwhelming crisis-bringing thing that ever happened to any of us,” says West, a fast-talking, sporty 31-year-old with long waves of brown hair.

The KONY 2012 campaign wanted a youth uprising — through tweets, rallies, and late-night poster blitzes — that would encourage the U.S. government to increase efforts to help Ugandan forces find and capture Kony. The video was told from Russell’s perspective, as he explained Kony and the LRA’s tens of thousands child abductions to his wide-eyed blond son, Gavin Danger, then 5.

Between the versions of “KONY 2012” on Vimeo and YouTube, the 30-minute film received 100 million views in six days — surpassing Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent performance (which took nine days to reach 100 million) and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video (18 days), according to audience data service Visible Measures.

And for a minute there, it seemed to be incredibly well received, particularly if you had any Facebook friends in the 16–24 demographic. Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Ryan Seacrest, Nicole Richie, Diddy, and the Kardashian sisters all tweeted their support. In San Diego, one intern in Invisible Children’s fulfillment department had 500,000 orders of $30 “action kits” to process. One intern in public relations had 4,000 emails and counting incoming from media outlets. Russell flew across the country for TV interviews twice in 48 hours.

But as millions clicked beyond the video, Invisible Children’s website crashed. And the lack of information left an incredibly open opportunity for critics to offer counter narratives.

The controversy wasn’t a surprise, West says. “But it got too big for us to talk to people who were upset. We’ve always simplified the issue down to a very understandable, non-academic, non-complex issue, which is offensive to some academics because they think you’re trivializing it. But for us, that is just the entry point. We’re trying to attract people into this issue but make it accessible for them. ‘KONY 2012’ was not trying to be a very P.C., well rounded, in-depth piece.”

To academics, this simplification was still deceiving, relying more on emotion than facts. Wronging Rights’ three-year-old criticism of Invisible Children received nearly 500,000 views in one day. By Friday, a Tumblr called Visible Children had nearly 2.2 million views. The blog’s creator, Grant Oyston, wasn’t a qualified expert on African issues; he was a 19-year-old Canadian political science student who offered some commentary, but mostly linked out to others’ criticism of “KONY 2012.” His influence, however, warranted comment from Invisible Children’s newly hired New York PR firm Sunshine, Sachs & Associates, who told The Canadian Press that the “things he’s written are important but are a little misinformed and naive.”

“I thought that was strange. It had this air of, ‘You young people don’t understand,’ but their whole target was young people,” says Oyston, who eventually got a call from an “emotional” Russell, offering to fly him to California or even Uganda to see Invisible Children’s programs in person. (He declined.) But Oyston still takes issue with being labeled anti-Invisible Children, admitting the charity has done some good work, and finds himself criticizing the entire cycle of KONY 2012 — praise, backlash, and all.

“I found it troubling how quickly people read my criticism and other more informed critiques and responded by giving up and not caring,” Oyston says. “This video made them excited about helping victims and then they read something on a blog and they said, ‘Never mind.’ I found that disheartening. “

No one denied that Kony was a criminal who should be brought to justice, but many were critical of the call — from young, white Americans — to help Uganda address a problem already generally thought to be resolved in that country. Uganda’s government spokesman even issued a statement: “Misinterpretations of media content may lead some people to believe that the LRA is currently active in Uganda. It must be clarified that at present the LRA is not active in any part of Uganda. Successfully expelled by the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces in mid-2006, the LRA has retreated to dense terrain within bordering countries in the Central Africa area. They are a diminished and weakened group with numbers not exceeding 300.”

Michael Wilkerson, a freelance writer and one of KONY 2012’s earliest critics, encouraged KONY 2012 supporters to consider the “potential collateral damage.”

“In previous offensives by the Ugandan military that didn’t quite catch Kony, what [happened] was the LRA ransacked and massacred vengefully as it fled, killing hundreds of civilians in the Congo in the winter of 2009,” he told NPR.

Others were offended by the portrayal of Uganda, down to the word “invisible,” including writer Dinaw Mengestu: “To claim [the children] were invisible because a group of college students traveling through Uganda happened to stumble upon a war they were too ignorant to have known of before going to the region is, to put it mildly, patronizing. By the time the organizers arrived in Uganda and created Invisible Children, northern villages such as Gulu were crowded with NGOs and aid workers and the largest humanitarian concern, by far, was the housing conditions of the more than one million people living in camps for the internally displaced.”

“That’s a tough one to talk about,” Keesey says today. “Of all the critiques that we got, it was the one that I never saw coming. Is Joseph Kony, who’s the world’s most prolific child abductor, worthy of a campaign to stop him? Is that a worthy pursuit? To see the LRA disarmed and to see these communities free from fear? That one took me off guard.”

Two weeks after “KONY 2012”’s release, Teju Cole wrote in The Atlantic about the “white savior” who “supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” and those who financially support him — without considering U.S. foreign policy’s role in the conflicts that yield large aid movements, or the wishes of those receiving the aid.

“I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference,’” Cole wrote. “There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.”

Cole’s analysis was smart and personal without overt hostility — something other critics couldn’t resist, particularly when it came to Russell’s role in the film. It resonated, and when talking about the backlash today, Invisible Children staff still cite the phrase “white savior industrial complex.”

“Our biggest mistake,” West says, “was we should have had supplementary materials that showed how much we really know. We should have had that secondary video that has all of our regional staff who are in fact from the regions in which we operate. It’s not a bunch of white California kids out in the region. These are professionals who have lived through this conflict their whole lives. We should have had that stuff in front when people came looking, but we were just too underwater to even figure that out.”

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Russell says he still hasn’t grasped how many people saw the clip of his naked rant. (Somewhere around 4.5 million, only counting the most popular versions on YouTube.) But he’s distinctly aware of the mark it left on Invisible Children’s internal culture. On his office bookshelf, next to thick, beat-up journals from his first Africa trip, Russell has a blue binder, where dozens of cards and press clippings and notes from friends and strangers and co-workers are collaged together. On the cover of the binder is a cut-out headline from Entertainment Weekly: “This was the year that… EVERYONE GOT NAKED.” The article didn’t include Russell, but he thought it was funny anyway.

“Coming back to work,” Russell says, “I think it was strange to hear a lot of people be like, ‘I was gonna move on, I was gonna get another job, I was gonna stop the internship, but I’m here for you to make sure you’re OK. I’ve stayed here for a year to make sure you’re OK.’”

On his first day back, one of Invisible Children’s writers wrote him a letter, which he picked out of all of the notes to show me:

“Welcome home. I’ve literally had dreams about this day when I would see you for the first time in Noelle and Heather’s office — slow motion hug and tears — and now my literal dreams are literally coming true. A couple things I didn’t realize about you ‘til you weren’t in the office anymore: Your ideas and designs push the envelope, yet you have the key skill of getting people on the same page in spite of your ideas’ extremity. You break convention but somehow make peace and bring everybody together over it. I miss that.”

“She’s saying, ‘I dreamt of you coming back,’ and I’m not even like that good friends with her!” Russell laughs. “I just … Yeah. I feel most at home here, so I always felt like I would come back if they would have me.”

Was that a question?

“Obviously if someone does what I did, they’re getting advice from a lot of people saying distance yourself as much as you can, ‘cause he’s really the thing that took the campaign off the rails. So I think they had to really think about what my position would be like, get a lot of advice, and figure out if it could work.”

Russell and I spoke for an hour before he made any reference to his faith, and only when I asked. In the past, he’s talked openly about his evangelical upbringing and its influence on his life and work — Russell’s parents are the founders of the national chain Christian Youth Theater; he and Poole and Bailey are definitive Christian bros. But after several critics accused Invisible Children of being a secretly religious and even anti-gay organization — including an Atlantic story accusing Russell of “secretly pulling our consciences towards Jesus” — he has notably scaled back the God talk. In October, when he was at Catalyst, the annual church leadership conference, Russell says he turned away questions from a Christian Science Monitor reporter who approached him.

“I feel so manipulated by people who think, I’m gonna get the scoop because I think he’s secretly trying to do this spiritual thing. Like if we really were the illuminati, how much more exciting would your article be? If we’re working with Jay Z? We’re in a homeless neighborhood — give me a break, we’re not illuminati.”

Russell says he watches service on TV and goes to church once in a while, but not on a consistent basis.

“Maybe this is a cop-out, but if you want to know about my spirituality, I’ll totally tell you. I can talk about my faith. I’m not afraid of it. But Invisible Children is not a faith-based religious organization at all. People forget that something like 80% of Americans call themselves a believer in God … So to have like 30% or even half of our staff have some kind of faith is just a demographic. No one’s trying to push an agenda.”

Russell believes — of course — that everything happens for a reason. On his bulletin board is a printed-out email from Oprah (her email address blacked out, much to certain visitors’ chagrin). Russell wrote her last year after reading that she recognized the symptoms of her own nervous breakdown after interviewing him.

“Hi Jason, I received your beautiful letter,” he says, more performing her email than reading it out loud. “Isn’t it beautiful how we’re all angels for each other and messages to heal come in all forms? Thank you for taking such fine care and reaching out to me. I hold you in the light — exclamation point!”

“So you saved Oprah?” I ask.

“For me, it’s like, OK, my breakdown was a shitshow. We all know that. But I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said, ‘I’ve had a breakdown. I’m on this medicine.’ It’s this dark secret that we’re all struggling with our mental health, and I think we should be vulnerable and honest and tell the truth. If my next 10 years ends with having to do with mental health or encouraging a generation to be real and honest — it’s the only way you’re gonna get free — then the breakdown was probably necessary for me to become something of an expert.”

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Russell speaks to roadies and staff, kicking off a tour at San Diego’s Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial on Sept. 17, 2013. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Ben Keesey, a towering 30-year-old with slicked-back hair, likes conversation; he wants to know about your day, where you grew up, and what your job is like. But he bounces, sometimes ungracefully, between youthful energy and political pragmatism, stuck between a world of San Diego interns who end every sentence with “awesome,” and D.C. lawmakers who don’t. He is relentlessly idealistic, a trait he embraces despite how often it’s been used against him and Invisible Children.

After KONY 2012, Keesey would say during interviews, “How do I show you my sincerity? How do I just show people my actual heart? Can they just tap into it for 10 minutes, so they can see we really do care about the people we work for?”

“There are times when I get sad,” Keesey says. “Because a lot of the concerns or skepticisms that we weren’t able to overcome put a lot of people on the sidelines that I believe want to be involved. At times, I actually personally process it as feeling very responsible and saying, ‘What more could I have done? Did I fail? Did I fail this organization and this cause by not being able to properly justify our actions or our integrity?’ It’s a very heavy burden on my heart.”

In the controversy’s aftermath, Invisible Children had difficulty booking school tours for the first time in years. The money wasn’t there like it used to be, with young fundraisers experiencing resistance — “from their families, their friends, people spitting on them, people calling them liars, people calling them stupid, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Russell says. “Before KONY 2012, our organization was predominantly seen as, Good job! You guys are inspiring, keep going, we believe in you. And all the sudden it flipped on its head — You guys are liars, you’re a scam factory, you’re fake, you’re embezzling the money, or whatever.”

By mid-2012, Invisible Children had nearly $26.5 million in revenue and $17 million in net assets. By mid-2013, the organization had $4.9 million in revenue (their lowest since 2005) and less than $6.6 million in assets. Sixty-five employees in the San Diego office became 29. Two floors of a building became one. About 130 staffers in Africa — 95% of them from the region — became 108.

And yet, KONY 2012 was objectively the organization’s most successful campaign ever, both in its mission — making Kony famous, even if on the other end of punch lines — and in policy.

On April 20, 2012, when KONY 2012 supporters were supposed to “cover the night,” a directive from the film to blanket city centers in posters and other anti-Kony propaganda, turnout was abysmal. But that month, President Obama announced the extension of a military advise-and-assist mission to central Africa. The European Union, as part of a declaration of support, established a Joint Operations Centre to assist central Africa’s counter-LRA regional task force. On Capitol Hill, Invisible Children’s reputation went from “very young film students” to issue experts invited to White House roundtables, according to The Enough Project, a policy-focused group that says it helped Invisible Children overcome “stumbling blocks” in its early lack of expertise. In January 2013, Congress passed the Rewards for Justice Bill, authorizing $5 million for information leading to Kony’s capture. It was at the bill’s signing in the Oval Office that Keesey asked Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to speak at the 2013 Fourth Estate Summit, Invisible Children’s second-ever conference of more than 1,000 supporters. She accepted, starting the speech — her first since being appointed ambassador — with “O.M.G.”

“KONY 2012 created the most opportunity and movement around this issue more than all the eight years before it combined,” says Noelle West, who spent a not insignificant amount of her time immediately after KONY 2012 responding to critical comments on charity database GuideStar, Reddit, and social media networks. “To know that’s what happened and still feel punished for it is strange.”

“It was game changer for the profile of the issue and for the movement at the international level,” Keesey says. “It’s absolutely caused us gigantic organizational challenges, personal challenges, ones that we’re still working through. But I think on balance, net net net to the mission, it was helpful. And from that standpoint, I would do it again.”

There are regrets, of course, in how the backlash was handled. From all vantage points, Invisible Children didn’t know how to talk about itself. The messages — and messengers — weren’t consistent.

Grant Oyston (and many others) cited his fundamental problem with Invisible Children as “their relentless focus on advocacy over action,” a criticism heightened by Invisible Children’s director of ideology Jedediah Jenkins’ post-KONY 2012 comment that “we are not an aid organization, and we don’t intend to be. I think people think we’re over there delivering shoes or food. But we are an advocacy and awareness organization.” (Later in March, a video of Jenkins joking around and drinking — or pretending to drink — while celebrating Invisible Children’s $1 million grant from Chase Community Giving made it to TMZ. Jenkins has since taken a break from the organization to go on a bike trip from Oregon to Patagonia.)

“That comment is a bit of a half-representation of even who we were in 2012,” Keesey says. “But at the same time, this conversation in itself illuminates the challenge that we have describing who we are, because who we are has changed, and changes and will change.”

Still, accusations surrounding the organization’s financial integrity remain the stickiest: that so much of its money is spent on travel and film production, that so little is spent on overseas programs, that it kept money from the KONY 2012 action kits.

“We were very much accused of financial impropriety,” Keesey says. “The feeling of potentially being scammed is one of the worst feelings in the world. And it’s not possible to reach back out to the amount of people that heard that message in the wake of KONY 2012 for them to feel rock-solid confident that we do get our finances audited every year, and 100% of our audits have come back with an unqualified opinion. We’ve had no legitimate cases or even accusations of actual fraud. That doesn’t exist.”

COO Chris Carver says when Invisible Children tried to explain its finances, he wishes he had “put out not just the literal components, but how much we felt this strategy was important, this allocation of funds to domestic education versus international operations — how much we believe in that.”

And yet Invisible Children substantially reallocated funds last year, spending about $4 million in the U.S. on media and mobilization efforts and nearly $7.8 million on Uganda recovery and protection programs, according to its annual IRS filings. The only other year Invisible Children gave more money to Uganda than the U.S. was in fiscal year 2009, but the difference was just under $750,000. This reversal was Keesey’s direction, made with consultation from the staff in Africa.

According to independent evaluator Charity Navigator, Invisible Children has spent at least 80% on programs since 2009, contradicting a widely circulated 32% figure that one interpretation of their finances (which discounted U.S. educational programs) yielded during KONY 2012. But Charity Navigator’s accountability rating of Invisible Children in 2011 — two of four stars — was another reason the organization’s finances were called into question, and largely a result of Invisible Children not having enough independent voting board members at the time. The rating was restored to four stars in 2012, after more members were added. (Invisible Children was also questioned for not filing with the Better Business Bureau, another voluntary measure of nonprofit transparency. Carver says the “Better Business Bureau stamp was just something that we haven’t gotten around to doing, because it takes a lot of time.”)

Carver estimates this year’s revenue will continue to be lower than Invisible Children’s past highs. There can never be another surprise Susan Boyle performance, and there can never be another KONY 2012, which cost in total $2.8 million. The organization very simply doesn’t have the resources, financially or emotionally: “To fool ourselves into thinking that we’re gonna convince the world that this is different is not the best use of our time,” Carver says.

Invisible Children’s only fundraising campaign in 2013 was ZeroLRA, which Russell calls “the least inspired I have been and everyone around here has been, even though we worked our butt off to make it happen and inspire our fundraisers and supporters.”

The problem comes down to originality, Russell says. Invisible Children has been telling stories about the LRA’s abductions for 10 years, over 12 documentaries. “How many different ways can you cut the cake? How many different ways can you actually approach the conflict and keep it fresh and exciting?”

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

The most important question, two years on: How did Invisible Children spend its KONY 2012 millions?

The answer: mostly on what it considers attack-prevention programs in known LRA activity regions, including one that uses helicopters to drop defection fliers — “truth campaigns to psychologically woo them,” as Keesey says, out of the jungle and to safe-reporting sites. Of last year’s 83 known defectors, 79% referenced the fliers, Invisible Children says. (In December, 19 LRA members defected together, the largest mass defection since 2008.)

Invisible Children has also been investing in data-gathering since 2010, when it launched the LRA Crisis Tracker, broadcasting LRA movements and attacks based on information relayed via 71 high-frequency radios. The community reports are vetted through regional experts and updated to the tracker twice daily. The tracker provides an email subscription service, which Invisible Children says is used by state and military officials in the U.S. and central Africa, local communities, and other NGOs, including those providing health services to rural communities.

Invisible Children’s community-improvement programs in Uganda — the “recovery” piece of the organization’s four-part model — have expanded and matured, too; there are now 401 students enrolled in its legacy scholarship program, up from the 135 in its inaugural class, and 4,025 adults enrolled in the village loans and adult literacy programs, up from 400 in its inception. (When asked for their opinions on these recent developments, many critics of “KONY 2012” told BuzzFeed they haven’t kept up with Invisible Children since the controversy two years ago.)

This year, Invisible Children will go after grants from government and philanthropy groups, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the LRA Fund, a small group of foundations supporting projects in LRA-affected communities. Keesey says the organization needs about $6.2 million this year to continue its programs and keep the lights on. Some of that will come from Invisible Children’s 10,230 monthly donors (with help from interns who make hundreds of calls a week) but not enough. The staff has come to accept that.

“We don’t need the masses, the gigantic grassroots movement, as much as we have in the past,” says West. That may change from time to time — Invisible Children is pushing an upcoming Senate resolution encouraging Obama to “finish the job and not reduce the amount of resources or commitment until we see a full dismantling of the LRA,” and will ask supporters in key districts to call or write to their senators.

But the reality is that Invisible Children can’t survive off the masses anymore. There will be no films or campaigns or tours this year — no 10-week trips led by interns (or “roadies”) screening films and spreading the word of Invisible Children around the U.S. There will be no large-scale Fourth Estate Summit, either — the conference Russell once described as “a TED talk, mixed with a music festival and a film festival, all mixed in a Justin Bieber concert,” with an average attendee age of 16. That means no 1,315 kids in T-shirts and bracelets spending $325–495 each, and no “spectacular wink and a nod to showmanship,” as Bobby Bailey, who attended the summits in 2011 and 2013, puts it. (There will be a smaller version of the event this year, an Invisible Children spokeswoman told BuzzFeed after this article’s publication.) Maybe Invisible Children will never return to that kind of showmanship; maybe it will never be able to afford to.

This scaling back has brought a certain restlessness to San Diego. Russell hasn’t been to Africa in two years; “There hasn’t been a real need for me to go out,” he says, with dozens of workers already on the ground. His next trip will likely be when Kony is caught or killed and the LRA is disbanded. Then, Invisible Children will either close its doors or change into something else entirely, with a different mission and different players.

“We all want to go do other amazing things at some point in our life, and we don’t want to hold ourselves back from that,” Carver says.

In “Move,” Invisible Children’s first film after “KONY 2012,” West says she was afraid that the backlash and Russell’s breakdown was the “beginning of the end … What if all this time we spent, all these things we built, are just, done?” It was certainly an option in 2012, but despite all its losses, Invisible Children wants to “work to put itself out of a job,” or so goes its spin line.

“I would love to shut the doors,” says West, who’s transitioning from communications director to an in-house consultant for companies seeking advice on viral campaigns. “I would love for there to be a big black screen when you come to IC.com after Kony is caught and there’s a process in place for rehabilitating the region so the LRA can’t come back. I would love for IC to be turned off. Why do you need us anymore? That’s just me, though.”

West wants to build furniture. Keesey is mulling over going back to school for sociology or psychology. Russell’s future may lie in some form of mental health advocacy — a field that may be a little more sympathetic to his intuition to put himself in his stories.

The 10 years they’ve spent on this single issue, maintaining all that swaggering idealism, has left the staff in a state of constant anticipation. They firmly believe the LRA’s demise is within sight and that they get closer every day to someone, somewhere, spotting Kony. And with that expectation comes an even stronger hope for vindication.

“It would be such a big deal. And people would come back to the cause and say, ‘Yeah I’ve been supporting you all along. I wanted Kony to be captured too,’” Russell says. “We definitely know that we need that win, and that the future of Invisible Children and the cause and the work that we do is completely reliant on believing that the win will happen soon. If he’s captured or killed in 2024, I would have a hard time believing we could sustain the narrative for much longer.”

Russell says there’s only one film he’s working on, currently plotted out on his big office whiteboard: the one he’ll release when Kony is gone. Whenever that is.

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Corrections: An earlier version of this article misrepresented Invisible Children’s office layout. The article has also been updated to clarify the LRA Crisis Tracker was launched in 2010, and that according to an Invisible Children spokeswoman, there will be a Fourth Estate Summit this year, contrary to earlier comments made by the staff. (3/10/14)

Update: On Dec. 15, Invisible Children announced it will put in place a strategy to close by the end of 2015.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/two-years-after-kony-2012-has-invisible-children-grown-up

#Jason Russell #kony 2012

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