Ryu Spaeth News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Look beyond the headlines: Even in what feels like an angry, factionalized society, there are signs of unity.

The war in Gaza has shifted something in the psyche of New York — at workplaces and in restaurants, on university campuses and in playgrounds, over Instagram and along lampposts.

Republicans sure seem to think so. They are not alone. 

In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents' immigration to Canada--of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, he portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother's lonely upbringing, his father's fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course--his parents, sister, uncles, cousins--and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainia...

Well, perhaps we don’t know that story, but we understand the context. So much of modern life is conducted on and mediated through the internet, constant electronic communication, and social media. In a way that would have been unthinkable barely a decade ago, we now have ready access to highly addictive and potentially immense platforms, providing a serious incentive to perform a personality online. This personality can be fun or dour, earnest or cynical, politically radical or smugly apolitical. Yet no matter what it is, this personality doesn’t quite reflect who we are offline. For so...