Deep Art Nature

Is Civil War Looming, or Should We Calm Down?

“In January of last year, shortly after the storming of the Capitol, the pollster John Zogby conducted a national survey that yielded a troubling finding: A plurality of respondents — 46 percent — believed that the United States is headed for another civil war.According to Barbara Walter, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies civil wars, that belief is perfectly within the realm of reason. ... Should Americans take the prospect of another civil war seriously, or do such warnings constitute a misguided, perhaps even dangerous form of alarmism? Here’s what people are saying. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Let’s Not Invent a Civil War

NY Times: We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country

NY Times: Are We Really Facing a Second Civil War?

Guardian: Is the US really heading for a second civil war?

The Harvard Gazette: We don’t need a civil war to be in serious trouble

Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the V&A

“Featuring highlights from the museum's collection of over 2,000 cuttings from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, this display explores the types of books these pieces came from and the 19th-century context in which they were cut up and collected. ...”

V&A

YouTube: Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval & Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the V&A 49:16

Trail of Tears

A map of the process of Indian Removal, 1830–1838. Oklahoma is depicted in light yellow-green.

“The Trail of Tears was part of the Indian removal, a series of forced displacements and ethnic cleansing of approximately 60,000 Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Tribal members ‘moved gradually, with complete migration occurring over a period of nearly a decade.’ Members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves) were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. ... The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. Suzan Shown Harjo of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian describes it as a genocide. ...”

W - Trail of Tears

W - Indian removal

W - Thomas Jefferson and Native Americans

YouTube: Cherokee Almanac: Removal Stockades, Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears

Britannica: Trail of Tears

How to Photograph the Northern Lights

A spectacular Aurora display in early 2015 captured from just north of Fairbanks Alaska

“As the Sun heads south for winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the nights grow longer and the opportunities to catch the northern lights, or aurora borealis, increase the further north you live or travel. Aurorae occur when charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) in the solar wind sneak past Earth's magnetic shield and collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere. As the ionized oxygen and nitrogen molecules return to their ‘ground’ state, they glow, much like a neon light does when electrical current runs through it. The results are awe-inspiring, and if you’ll forgive the metaphor, magical. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Especially active aurora will also include Nitrogen atoms which will glow a pink or magenta color.

Oath Keepers Leader Charged With Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Investigation

“Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was arrested on Thursday and charged along with 10 others with seditious conspiracy over what prosecutors said was their wide-ranging plot to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year and disrupt the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory. The arrest of Mr. Rhodes, 56, was a major development in the sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack. He and the other Oath Keepers are the first to be charged with sedition among the more than 700 people accused so far of taking part in the assault. ... The Justice Department has brought a variety of charges in connection with the Capitol attack; it has prosecuted about 275 people for obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the 2020 presidential vote count, for example. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Jan. 6 Inquiry Weighs a Major Escalation: Subpoenaing Colleagues

NY Times: Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Four Big Tech Firms

Mother Jones: “Seditious Conspiracy” Charges Against Oath Keepers Mark a Major Advance in January 6 Investigation

W - Oath Keepers

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack

NY Times: Tracking the Oath Keepers Who Attacked the Capitol (Jan. 2021)

Travelling in the giant footsteps of Tony Soprano’s New Jersey

“After the fuzz of the classic HBO intro screen departed, a fractured view of the New Jersey turnpike rolled into the lounge and television would never be the same again. Even the mere opening credits sequence hinted at the cinematic twist The Sopranos was about to give TV that has proved wildly seminal ever since. Iconic skyline sights melded with the gritty inner workings of the locale, all through the occasional plume of puffed cigar smoke, giving the show a deep sense of contextualisation from the off. Sadly, a lot of modern shows have mimicked this cinematic sense without ever delivering the same substance. ...”

Far Out Magazine (Video)

2011 June: The Sopranos, 2012 March: The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos, 2013 June: James Gandolfini, 2015 April: David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene, 2019 January: Television Learned the Wrong Lessons From The Sopranos, 2019 June: Don’t Stop: The Sopranos ends, 2020 July: The Sopranos - Season 1, 2020 July: Season 2, 2020 August: Season 3, 2020 August: Season 4, 2020 September: Season 5, 2020 December: Season 6, 2021 October: The 12 Defining Scenes of ‘The Sopranos’

The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae

“This heavily illustrated guide to reggae is a colourful, herbally endowed and sunsplashed history of one of the world’s most popular musical styles. Reggae was born in 1960s Jamaica, a potent mix of such indigenous genres as ska and rocksteady plus R&B, jazz and traditional African rhythms. Before long, it had conquered the globe, influencing musicians from Britain to Brazil. The Encyclopedia of Reggae focuses on the music’s golden age, from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s heyday of dancehall and features more than 500 images, including rare album art and ephemera. Written by one of the foremost experts on the subject, this amazing resource profiles more than 200 key performers, impresarios and producers from reggae’s history. ...”

Pauze Radio

Mike Alleyne, author of "The Encyclopedia of Reggae..."

amazon

YouTube: Encyclopedia of Reggae - The Golden Age Of Roots Reggae - MyVinyl preview

A French Village: The Complete Series

“A French Village starts off on June 12, 1940, with a premiere that includes a German fighter plane shooting at children on a school trip. The scene is suspenseful but also staged with deliberate restraint, like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare before anybody quite realizes it. The series that follows sticks to that matter-of-fact, almost detached tone. Life in the fictional Villeneuve, a village in occupied France about sixty miles from Switzerland, is irreversibly upended by German rule but still retains a routine element.The pitch for A French Village could fit on half a napkin: Each season covers roughly one year of the occupation of Villeneuve in World War II. ...”

Voice: ‘A French Village,’ Streaming on Amazon, Examines Life After Evil Triumphs (Nov. 2016)

The Nation: Tangled in the Garden of Good and Evil (Sep. 2018)

A Historical Drama and a Master Class (Oct. 2020)

Why the Wartime TV Series “A French Village” Is Important (July 2018)

W - Un village français

amazon

YouTube: "A French Village" - Season 5 Critic's Quotes (Trailer)

Conceptual Personae: The many imagined lives of Fernando Pessoa

“‘Sockpuppeting’ is internet slang for the contemporary variety of an age-old hoax: with a fake account registered under a pseudonym, a social media user becomes free to post whatever they like, unfettered by the wearisome burdens of attribution. Perhaps a pundit wishes to promote his own book without appearing to do so himself. ... The poet who produced that work was named Fernando Pessoa, but the majority of his finest poems were signed with three different names. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis were not, however, mere pseudonyms; they were separate identities—what Pessoa called ‘heteronyms’—crafted to undertake distinct and diverging poetic projects. ...”

The Baffler

2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem, 2017 September: Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act, 2020 February: Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, 2021 August: The Heteronymous Identities of Fernando Pessoa By Richard Zeniths

Hasaan Ibn Ali ‎– Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album (2021)

“During his lifetime, pianist and composer Hasaan Ibn Ali (1931-1980) was a jazz enigma. The Philly musician practiced with John Coltrane during the early '50s and is credited as the primary influence on the saxophonist's ‘sheets of sound’ harmonic approach first articulated on Giant Steps -- a sound that exploded across his Impulse! work. Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album is a genuine jazz holy grail, one of only two albums to feature the pianist's compositions and unique playing style. ... The music, though easier to approach in the 21st century, is quite radical in harmonic density and rhythmic invention. Opener ‘Atlantic Ones’ offers a Monk-esque lyric intro before the band careens across a knotty bop head. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

All About Jazz

W - Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Metaphysics (Full Album)

Weekly Beats 2022: "Three Clock Problem"

“I’m gonna give the Weekly Beats series (weeklybeats.com) another go this year. It’s a great online community, one where people post their tracks and comment on each other’s. Unlike with the Disquiet Junto and other communities, there is no required compositional prompt, though folks do propose such things in the WB forums. My first Weekly Beats recording of the year, ‘Three Clock Problem,’ is a simple drone (yeah, yeah, arguably beat-less) I put together in VCV Rack 2. A series of quantized pitches are sent through a reverb that has a wide array of controls. ...”

disquiet (Audio)

Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom

Check your privilege, squirrel.

“Some North American red squirrels are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They live in pine forests where the adults defend caches of food. Without a cache of their own, many baby squirrels won’t survive the winter. But each year, some squirrel mothers abandon their territory, bequeathing all their food to one or more babies who stay behind. These young squirrels are much more likely to survive until the spring. Across the animal kingdom, there are other examples of species that share resources such as territory, tools and shelter between generations. ...”

NY Times

W - American red squirrel

AFCON 2021 guide: The storylines, the underdogs and the games you won’t want to miss

“The latest Africa Cup of Nations is just around the corner. It’s been a long road to get here for a competition that has been moved around the calendar multiple times and, in the style of Euro 2020 last summer has the ‘wrong’ year in its official title, but 24 teams are now finally set to duke it out in Cameroon to become the next champions of Africa, with the tournament getting underway on Sunday, and finishing on Sunday, February 6. Here’s everything you need to know. ..."

The Athletic (Audio)

NY Times: The Joy in Embracing the Unknown (Video)

New Frame: Behind concerns over Afcon is a culture of disdain

Predicting the Africa Cup of Nations 2021 Winner

GOAL - Afcon 2021 predictions: The contenders and the pretenders (Video)

BBC - Afcon 2021: Everything you need to know about tournament in Cameroon (Video)

****Africa Is a Country 1:11:15 (Audio)

In ‘African Origin’ Show at Met, New Points of Light Across Cultures

Partnerships: Spanning eras and cultures, a pairing of artworks from “The African Origin of Civilization” includes “The King’s Acquaintances Memi and Sabu” from Egypt, ca. 2575–2465 B.C. and “Seated Couple” from Mali, 18th or early 19th century.

“Object for object, there isn’t an exhibition in town more beautiful than ‘The African Origin of Civilization’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nor is there one more shot through with ethical and political tensions.The gathering of 42 sculptures in one of the Met’s Egyptian galleries unites, for the first time here, pieces from its Ancient Egyptian and sub-Saharan African holdings, centuries apart (the earliest sub-Saharan work on view is from the 13th century). The pretext for the display is a practical one. ...”

NY Times

MET Museum: The African Origin of Civilization

A photographer captures a New York City of abstraction in the 1940s

“The street photographers who point their cameras all over the city tend to focus on people in motion in recognizable places—the rush of crowds on a subway platform, barflies at a corner tavern, or the random strollers, workers, loafers, and others found at any moment in time on specific streets and sidewalks. ...”

Ephemeral New York

The Legacy of Atlanta Hip Hop, Mapped

“A new map tells the story of Atlanta’s expansive hip hop legacy. For this week’s MapLab, CityLab’s Brentin Mock has the details: Some of the places and buildings on the ATL Rap Map are no longer actually still standing. They live in memory, and in the lyrics recited by the Atlanta rappers the map honors. The kings and queens of Atlanta’s hip hop culture — Outkast, Jermaine Dupri, Crime Mob and one of its newest stars, Latto, to name a few — frame a portrait of the city, which from a distance looks like a cluster of buildings and street signs surrounded by forests. ...”

Bloomberg

Reddit - Maps

The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

“I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one. Coffee expert and author of The World Atlas of Coffee James Hoffmann introduces us to the appliance we think we know in the above video.Alfonso Bialetti didn’t originally get into the coffee business. In 1919, the Bialetti company was an aluminum manufacturer, with the Moka Express invented somewhere around 1933 by Luigi de Ponti, who worked for the company. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship

Mario Batkovic - Introspectio (2021)

“Mario Batkovic plays the accordion. Sounds straightforward enough. Except he plays the accordion in the manner of Steve Reich or Terry Riley if they were entranced by the carnivalesque dancing of a youthful Alejandro Jodorowsky, their nimble fingers reenacting the exuberant choreography upon compressed keys. And Batkovic’s fingers work overtime, like Lubomyr Melnyk transported to a squeezebox. He approaches his instrument in the same way that Richard Dawson plays the guitar: it’s recognisable but the musician doesn’t appear to be following any of the rules or tropes that you would normally associate with that instrument. Instead, we’re treated to mantle-deep bellows, glistening twinkles, and squelchy, fuzz-caked riffage akin to the guitar work of Muse but with ideas beyond basic pageantry. This is music for classicists. ...”

The Quietus (Audio)

Mario Batkovic

Bandcamp: Introspectio (Audio)

YouTube: INTROSPECTIO 1 / 6

Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

“On the title page of my paperback copy of Walden, an echo of a former self greets me. My name, written in loopy adolescent script, and the date: August 12, 1993. I was 17 when I bought the Vintage Books/Library of America edition at Waldenbooks in the Bridgewater Commons Mall, using proceeds from a summer job. I dutifully read it in those final weeks of summer, with pen in hand, underlining here, making embarrassing marginal comments there. One late afternoon, I was sitting alone at home, working my way through the book, when my boyfriend stopped by unexpectedly. I couldn’t have planned it better. I had wanted to be seen just so: dim room, puddle of light from a lamp, reading Thoreau. So goes a story about the Transcendentalists and my world. ...”

New Republic (Audio)

2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II

The Morgan Library & Museum: Henry David Thoreau’s journal, The Transcendentalist: 5 March 1853 (Audio)

Stargazing with Ice Cold Enthusiasm

“It was New Year’s Eve Eve — New Year’s Eve Squared? — and a friend sent an email to our writers’ group about greeting the coming year with deliberate passion and cheer. There was a reply chain about setting aside difficulties in order to appreciate the bigger picture, like celebrating that you’re on a hike in an old-growth forest instead of lamenting the cold rain. In short, we wanted to prioritize enthusiasm, re-centering our experiences to focus on the positive despite the humdrum, and to appreciate the awesomeness of each moment so that nothing becomes ‘old hat.’ It’s a worthy theme for a new year. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Elvin! - Elvin Jones (1962)

“No one can prove that Elvin Jones — or Buddy or Max or anyone else — was the greatest jazz drummer. But making the case for Elvin wielding a more profound influence than any rhythm master is a snap. Take him out of the history of this music and suddenly you have nobody there to prove that drummers could play in rhythm and out of meter at the same time. You have nobody making the case that the drums could play with rather than behind a soloist. You have nobody pushing way beyond the beat, into texture and dynamic interaction, where drummers once scarcely roamed. ...”

The Magnificent Life Of Elvin Jones

W - Elvin!

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Elvin! Elvin Jones 1 / 7

Lawmakers Speak After Biden Warns of ‘a Dagger at the Throat of America’

“President Biden forcefully denounced former President Donald J. Trump for promoting lies and tearing down democracy because he could not stand the fact that he lost a free and fair election, accusing his predecessor and his allies of holding ‘a dagger at the throat of America.’ In his most sustained and scathing attack on the former president since taking office, Mr. Biden used the anniversary of the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol to condemn Mr. Trump for waging an ‘undemocratic’ and ‘un-American’ campaign against the legitimacy of the election system that he likened to the actions of autocrats and dictators in faraway countries. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times - The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot

NY Times - Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation (June 2021)

Treasonous Clowns On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The attack resulted in five people dead and over 130 wounded. An investigation is ongoing. By Patricia Anderson Turner

Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011)

“A freewheeling travelogue, a kaleidoscopic survey of the contemporary art scene, and a loving ode to creativity in all its forms, this five-part miniseries by the inimitable Agnès Varda takes us on a journey of discovery as she travels the globe—from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City to Los Angeles—meeting with friends, artists, and fellow filmmakers. Along the way there are chats with titan auteurs Chris Marker (offering a window into his virtual reality world) and a 102-year-old Manoel de Oliveira (doing his best Chaplin impersonation); visits to the Hermitage Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the home of Frida Kahlo; glimpses into the studios of acclaimed visual artists like Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Pierre Soulages; and Varda’s casually profound musings on everything from rivers to the Dutch masters to her own photography and installation works. ...”

Criterion

Review: Agnès Varda: From Here to There

French Culture

Criterion Channel: AGNÈS DE CI DE LÀ VARDA: Episode 1

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), 2017 February: Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90, 2019 April: Mur Murs (1980), 2020 May: Socialism and cha-cha-cha: Agnès Varda's photos of Cuba forgotten for 50 years, 2020 August: Four Ways of Looking at Agnès Varda

Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death

“1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. 1943 Freedom hates death most of all, but love is a close second. ...”

The Paris Review

A Long, Hard Year for Republicans Who Voted to Impeach After Jan. 6

Before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, members of Congress gathered at a joint session to confirm the Electoral College votes cast in the 2020 election.

“The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump did so with the same conviction — that a president of their party deserved to be charged with inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the same hope — that his role in doing so would finally persuade the G.O.P. to repudiate him. But in the year since the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries, none of the 10 lawmakers have been able to avoid the consequences of a fundamental miscalculation about the direction of their party. The former president is very much the leader of the Republicans, and it is those who stood against him whom the party has thrust into the role of pariah. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but One Big Question Remains

NY Times: How Trump Kept His Grip After Jan. 6

NY Times: Capitol Police Chief Commits to Security Improvements

NY Times: Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

Best Chet Baker Pieces: 20 Jazz Essentials

“It can be difficult to untangle the romantic myth surrounding Chet Baker from the merits of his music. His stratospheric rise in the early 1950s owed much to the elegant style and rhythmic grace of his trumpet playing, but his good looks didn’t hurt, and by the time he started to sing in a fragile and androgynous tone that sounded unlike any other singer, he became a teenage pin-up and a celebrity, a rarity in the jazz world. Baker spent his early years in Oklahoma and moved to Southern California with his family as an adolescent. By 1952, he became a regular at jam sessions at the Hermosa Beach club The Lighthouse and played with Charlie Parker on a string of dates on the West Coast. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2019 May: Italian Movies (2014), 2019 June: Let's Get Lost - Bruce Weber (1988), 2019 July: Time After Time: The Lasting Legacy Of Chet Baker

The Five Kingdoms of Football

“... Farther up the snowy coast you meet a druid. Actually, he calls himself a ‘football data analyst’ — more impenetrable dialect from the locals, but in English, it seems to mean druid or mage or something. He’s carrying enchanted parchments painted with numbers and colourful shapes. You catch a glimpse of one that sort of looks like a pizza.The Counter Kingdom is at war, the druid tells you, against not one rival sovereign but four. The Five Kingdoms have always been at war. He says no one remembers exactly how it started but the whole conflict has to do with a ball. ...”

The Athletic

Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

“The Editorial Board. One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6. (Audio) “On the morning of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a 31-year-old United States Capitol Police officer, was stationed by some stairs on the Capitol grounds when the energy of the crowd in front of her seemed to take on a different shape; it was like that moment when rain suddenly becomes hail. A loud, sour-sounding horn bleated, piercing through the noise of the crowd, whose cries coalesced into an accusatory chant: ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ ...”

VOX: How does this end? “Americans have long believed our country to be exceptional. That is true today in perhaps the worst possible sense: No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse. January 6, 2021, should have been a pivot point. The Capitol riot was the violent culmination of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ war on the legitimacy of American elections — but also a glimpse into the abyss that could have prompted the rest of the party to step away. Yet the GOP’s fever didn’t break that day. ...”

POLITICO - Hundreds of crimes, little punishment: Inside the sentences since the Capitol attack

The Nation: The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection

NY Times: Jan. 6 Panel Faces Difficult Questions as Anniversary of Capitol Riot Approaches

NY Times: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump