Salon.com > Jina Moore

Looting in Oklahoma?

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Looting. Almost immediately, the word creeps into the conversation.

It’s a word we need to be careful with.

Less than 24 hours after the tornado struck Moore, Okla., looting became part of the story. The word, and outrage about it, are all over Twitter. Most tweets don’t name the source for the rumor. Here’s the most trustworthy tweet I saw early this morning:

KFOR reporter says docs told her of looting at hospital damaged by the Moore Tornado. — Andy Carvin (@acarvin) May 20, 2013

The tweet is from Andy Carvin, NPR’s senior strategist. I saw it because it was retweeted by Rukmini Callimachi, a terrific AP staffer based in West Africa.

Which is to say, I trust Callimachi, who brought me this information from a source who also seems reputable. When you’re getting your news from Twitter, trust is everything. On the other hand, this also isn’t that much information. Trustworthy as Carvin seems, as best I can tell, he’s a guy who was watching TV or read somewhere about what was broadcast on TV, and he’s tweeting what another reporter said that someone told her.

Remembering the Holocaust one scrap at a time

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:00:00 +0000

For its 20th birthday this year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum went on “tour” – its word, not mine. In New York, at a Hilton Hotel, 2,000 people stopped by, 200 of them Holocaust survivors. The survivors wore badges that said “SURVIVOR” in orange letters; they were honored with a noon tribute. Some put pins in a corkboard map to show where they were at the war’s end – one pierced the border of then-Russia and Afghanistan – and others left their coordinates in a guest book. “Ashwitz – good to be alive.” “In Limoges, France, convent Notre Dame de Nazareth.” “In the field Fel de Fink – aboard train, after 7 camps @ age 17!!”

The “tour” seems to have a mix of motives – educational, affirmational, memorial. The museum offers a day of public programming on various historical aspects of the Holocaust and an interactive “family” section where young people can express the meaning and values of tolerance. But the most museum-like aspect is archival: Curators have been lining up appointments in five cities – Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago and Boca Raton, Fla. – and evaluating survivors and veterans’ relics and listening to their stories.

Don’t blame the victim, or the photographer

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:00:00 +0000

This week, the Internet got angry at Sara Naomi Lewkowicz. The 30-year-old photographer had the audacity to photograph domestic violence – and to publish the photos in a major magazine just as Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

In the photos, we see a 31-year-old man named Shane throw his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie against a set of kitchen cabinets. He traps her with his body against a kitchen counter. He chokes her. At one point, her 2-year-old-daughter walks in and stamps her feet as she sees what’s happening.

The Internet thinks this is Sara’s fault.

Sara’s photo essay, earlier called “Maggie and Shane” and originally published at fotovisura.com, was published Wednesday as “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence” in Time’s “Lightbox” photography feature. The 39-frame story is edited down from photos taken in three visits with the couple over roughly as many months.

How fiction fooled Hitler

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Before there was James Bond, there was Gregory Sallust. Unlike Bond, who is just sexy fun, Sallust was out to trick the Nazis, defeat Hitler and save the world. The debonair anti-Nazi crusader was the most popular fictional hero in England, and Dennis Wheatley, his creator, was the war’s best-selling author, along with Agatha Christie.

Wheatley’s Sallust slips in and out of Germany on spying missions, often at crucial junctures. He tries to overthrow Hitler and bring down Vichy France. It’s all fantasy, of course, except that Wheatley writes around real events in what counted, in the radio era, as real time: His wartime novels appeared only a few months after the events their plots relied on.

And then it got even more real. The British military took notice of Wheatley’s work and thought he might have a thing or two to teach officers and bureaucrats about the Nazi mind. So convincing is Wheatley’s war fiction that Wheatley was taken up as the great imaginary mind of the war, in an effort the Brits dubbed “deception.”