Plowshares into swords, bollards into furniture. Can we safely walk yet?

Photo credit: the article.

Just imagine the day when we have so many people walking in New Albany that city council spends money to install street bollards aimed at protecting them.

Although perhaps a useful first step would be doing more to make streets and sidewalks safe for all users, in everyday life, apart from those statistically infrequent occasions of vehicular terrorism -- as opposed to drivers using their mobile devices while traveling down a city street as though it were an interstate.

This ingenious hack turns anti-terror bollards into furniture, by Katherine Schwab (Fast Company)

Defensive street architecture is designed to prevent terrorist attacks. But it could also double as a way to bring strangers together.

In the last few years, vehicle-aided terrorism has become a horrible reality for many cities. To protect pedestrians, cities have expanded efforts to install street bollards, peppering the urban landscape with these three-foot-high metal barriers. After New York was hit by a truck-borne terrorist in 2017, the government decided to spend $50 million on bollards, dramatically increasing the footprint of this defensive architecture on the streets.

Could these increasingly common devices serve a second purpose–and bring strangers together on city streets? That’s the idea behind three prototypes by the Peruvian designer and architect Beatriz Pero Giannini. The three chairs–called the rocker, the slider, and the wobbler–sit atop bollards and function like seesaws. If one person sits down they’ll probably be uncomfortable, but if two people sit together it brings each design into balance. By encouraging people to sit down together, Giannini hopes to bolster a sense of community among strangers.

Reconstruction: "Democracy was subverted, and the human toll, however inexact, was enormous." Bye bye, Castleman and Prentice.

There can be little doubt that Southern whites engaged in post-war racial terrorism, effectively thwarting Reconstruction. I was unaware of the life story of Robert Smalls, and this is a welcome corrective.

Terrorized African-Americans Found Their Champion in Civil War Hero Robert Smalls, by Douglas Egerton (Smithsonian)

The formerly enslaved South Carolinian declared that whites had killed 53,000 African-Americans, but few took the explosive claim seriously—until now

... Fifty-three thousand dead is a staggering number—more than all the dead, wounded and missing at the Battle of Gettysburg. Even spread over the 30 years that had elapsed since Appomattox, that would be an average of 1,766 murders each year, or almost five each day, across the 11 former Confederate states.

When I first read Smalls’ speech while researching political violence in the years after the Civil War, I was stunned. Most estimates of postwar killings of African-Americans amount to about 4,000 public lynchings committed between 1877 and 1968. But what about those who were assassinated or disappeared before 1877, the year Reconstruction began to decline? How did Smalls arrive at that figure? Perhaps he simply invented it to capture the nation’s attention or to appeal to the sympathy of moderate Southern whites. But this figure, like others in his oration, was precise. He could have said “about fifty thousand” or even “more than fifty thousand,” but he didn’t. Was his number even plausible? Could it be verified? As far as I could tell, no historian had tried.

The answer matters because it captures a shifting understanding of what brought the nation’s first meaningful campaign for racial equality to a halt. Too often, the central question about the postwar period is why Reconstruction failed, which implies that the process itself was flawed in ways that contributed to its own demise. But Smalls’ death toll, if even close to accurate, adds substantial weight to the idea that Reconstruction was overthrown—by unremitting clandestine violence ...

"Anti-abortion extremists are domestic terrorists."

If we spend our days fearing Muslims halfway across the planet, we won't think to look in our own backyards. Opposed to violence? Then the opposition needs to be uniform.

Anti-abortion extremists are domestic terrorists: They have created fear among providers that something violent can happen to any of them at any time, by David Cohen and Krysten Connon (Al Jazeera)

Part of Kristina Romero’s job as the regional director for several reproductive health clinics in the South, some of which offer abortion services, is to drive one of the clinic doctors to and from work. That way anti-abortion extremists can’t identify the doctor’s car.

One day, as Romero left her home, she saw a big poster with the doctor’s picture in a bullseye. There were more: The posters started in front of her house and continued along the entire route she took to get to the clinic.

To Romero, the posters were not only threatening to the doctor, but also to her. That they lined her route to work was a clear sign that anti-abortion extremists had followed her. The message, she explained, “was for me to be scared. It was for me. There’s nothing in my experience with the protesters that stands out more than that morning when I got up to go get the doctor and saw the doctor’s picture all over town.”

This is just one example of what abortion providers face in America today.

Domestic vs. Muslim terrorism.

Food for the kitchen table.

The benefits of hindsight: The need for more monitoring of domestic terrorism, in The Economist

... since coming under Republican control in 2010, the House Homeland Security Committee has held five hearings on Muslim radicalisation, and none on right-wing threats. Yet America’s right-wing extremists commit a vastly greater number of murderous attacks (though leading to fewer deaths) than Muslims do.