After Dallas (David Cole, The New York Review of Books)

The images that saturated social media over the last few days all should have borne warnings of their graphic content. The first depicted a police officer in Louisiana repeatedly shooting Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man, at point-blank range while he was pinned to the ground. That was Tuesday. The next day, an extraordinary ten-minute video showed Philandro Castile, a thirty-two-year-old black resident of Minnesota, bleeding to death in the front seat of his car after being shot by an officer in a Minneapolis suburb, again at point-blank range, during what should have been a routine stop for a burned-out taillight. In the video, Castile’s girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter look on, helpless, as the police do nothing to aid Castile. The third video, from Thursday night, showed police officers and a crowd of peaceful protesters in Dallas running for cover from a sniper who shot twelve police officers and two civilians, killing five of the officers, in a mass shooting inspired by police abuse.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/07/08/after-dallas-police-shooting-violence-begets-violence/

The Standoff in Bangladesh (Joseph Allchin, The New York Review of Books)

The first time I walked into the Holey Bakery, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of its owners was on the verdant front lawn, a rare holdover of old-world extravagance in the country’s densely inhabited capital. Situated next to a lake in the upscale Gulshan neighborhood, the bakery and its sister restaurant, the O’Kitchen, occupied the house in which, he said, he had fallen in love with his wife. A rare venue for European food, it catered to affluent foreigners and the country’s elite; less than a dozen dimly-lit marble-topped tables stretched around impressive imported ovens inside, with a few on a terrace for use when weather allowed.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/07/08/standoff-in-bangladesh-islamist-violence-july-first-attack/