Category Archives: Viva!

Kerber stuns Serena to win Australian Open

Angelique Kerber causes a stunning upset to beat world number one Serena Williams in the Australian Open women’s final on Rod Laver Arena.

‘We Will Not Apologize’: Chronicling the Defiant Women of India – The New York Times

At this point I delved into a world of shocking statistics. Despite India’s prolonged economic expansion, the percentage of women in the work force remains dismally low — lower than in any country in the G-20 other than Saudi Arabia — and it is dropping. More than 70 percent of women say they have to ask permission from a parent, husband or in-law if they want to leave home to visit a health center or to see a friend in the neighborhood.Peepli Khera seemed like a good place to learn why this state of affairs had persisted. Life there was being rearranged in tangible ways by economic growth — specifically, a booming buffalo meat export industry. Last summer, the increase in female employment in the village had erupted into a raw power struggle, with the conservative male caste leaders demanding that the women resign from their jobs. I thought we — the photographer, Andrea Bruce; the interpreter, Ravi Mishra; and I — would merely plant ourselves there and watch them duke it out.This was easier said than done.

Last summer, the increase in female employment in the village had erupted into a raw power struggle, with the conservative male caste leaders demanding that the women resign from their jobs. I thought we — the photographer, Andrea Bruce; the interpreter, Ravi Mishra; and I — would merely plant ourselves there and watch them duke it out.This was easier said than done. In the end we made nine reporting trips to the village, staying until late at night — when the whiskey kicked in — and arriving before dawn. We collected firewood with the women, accompanied them as they went looking for work, and tagged along on court dates. We spent so much time in the village that the people there began to regard us with sincere pity.Then they began to ignore us. This is when the work began to bear fruit. We became professional eavesdroppers. Four months into our reporting, we were in the village for a series of tense, clamorous late-night meetings, in which the elders grudgingly decreed that the women could return to work.That night, the headman, Roshan, pushed us out of the village with his hands pressed against our backs; later he admitted that he had done so because he did not want us to witness violence. We returned to New Delhi and almost immediately learned that a large group of villagers had assaulted Geeta and her friends, also leaving her husband badly injured. We returned to find our subjects utterly changed — unhurt for the most part, but humiliated and shrunken. One teenage girl never forgave us for failing to protect her.

In real life, stories do not have crisp endings, and the battle of Peepli Khera was no different: When we returned this month, it looked as though Geeta and her friends had gotten much of what they had wanted. They had held on to their jobs and avoided begging for forgiveness or paying a fine.

Roshan was very sick, with what seemed to be tuberculosis, and carried out long, expletive-laced conversations with the goddess Kali over his magic necklace. “How are you coming? Are you coming on a horse cart? Are you coming on the wind?” he said to the goddess, then paused to wait for her response. After a moment had passed, he remarked, “They can go to hell.”Geeta, meanwhile, is rebuilding her house a full story above street level so that she can look out of her windows and over her neighbors’ roofs. I started to explain that the article was going to appear in the newspaper, but she was busy collecting a debt for the local women’s lending collective and had no time talk.

“I’ll say to her face, bring her in front of me and I’ll say it to her face — two months have passed and she will have to give the money up,” she was snapping into her cellphone. She waved goodbye as we made our way down the dark lane — every inch the cheerful, ruthless village power broker. That is the last image I had of her.

Source: ‘We Will Not Apologize’: Chronicling the Defiant Women of India – The New York Times

“It’s like I’m on eggshells all the time. Nothing but stress. …

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“It’s like I’m on eggshells all the time. Nothing but stress. I get $696 a month from social security. I could get more if I pretend to be bipolar like some people I know, but they make you take medicine to get your disability benefits. I’m not going to sit around like a zombie to get extra money. When I pay my bills, I have $30 left over. I can feed myself with 59-cent cans of tuna. I tried one of those food pantries but they aren’t even worth the time. I didn’t even know that pints of milk still existed. The bus drivers in the Bronx are cool so they let me ride for free. So that’s good. I can get around. But I can’t afford for anything to go wrong. Some lady is letting me stay in her place for cheap while she lives with her daughter, so I have a place to live. But it’s rent controlled so I’m not even supposed to be there. Every time I go home it’s like four layers of doom. First I’m terrified that my key won’t work. Then I’m terrified that there’s a letter in my mailbox. Then I’m afraid that the elevator won’t work—but that’s just cause I’m a lazy fuck. And then when I finally get to my apartment, I’m afraid there’s a letter under the door. Nothing but stress. I never feel safe. Every time there’s a knock on the door, I think it’s the end.”

Kenny Sailors, a Pioneer of the Jump Shot, Dies at 95 – The New York Times

If anyone can be said to have immortalized Sailors, it was the Life magazine photographer Eric Schaal. He was courtside at Madison Square Garden in January 1946, when, in a game between Wyoming and Long Island University, his camera caught Sailors airborne.

In the picture, Sailors, in black high-tops, is suspended a full yard above the hardwood and at least that much over the outstretched hand of his hapless defender. The ball is cradled above his head, elbow at 90 degrees, his right hand poised to fling the shot with a snap of the wrist that will have it backspinning to the rim along a high arc.

The photograph, appearing in one of America’s widest-circulating magazines, made an impact coast to coast.“A shot whose origins could be traced to isolated pockets across the country — from the North Woods to Ozarks, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific — was suddenly by virtue of one picture as widespread as the game itself,” the journalist John Christgau wrote in his book “The Origins of the Jump Shot.” “Everywhere young players on basketball courts began jumping to shoot.”

Source: Kenny Sailors, a Pioneer of the Jump Shot, Dies at 95 – The New York Times