Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago Tribune: U.S. extradition OK'd for Ukrainian billionaire indicted in Chicago and linked to Trump by Kim Janssen
Ukrainian oligarch Dimitri Firtash successfully fought efforts to bring him to face justice in a Chicago courtroom for most of President Barack Obama’s second term.
But now an Austrian court has ordered the billionaire — who has ties to both the Kremlin and to President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort — be extradited to the U.S. to face racketeering charges.
Taken into custody in Vienna by Austrian police following the court’s ruling Tuesday, Firtash is also wanted by Spanish authorities. But the odds of him finally standing before a federal judge in Chicago have gone up considerably.
And Firtash has assembled a formidable all-star American legal team to defend him.
The Depaulia: Fake reports of ICE raids spread fear by Danielle Harris
False reports of immigration raids on Chicago schools and churches and identification checks at the Addison Red Line stop were widely shared on social media Feb. 14, increasing fears among undocumented immigrants. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) confirmed that they did administer “random bag checks” at the Addison stop alongside Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents Feb. 14, but these checks were part of anti-terrorism bag screenings that began in 2014.
The fake reports were so widely spread that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) released a statement debunking the rumors.
“We are aware of rumors on social media about immigration status-related ID checks on CTA,” the statement said. “We want to be very clear that there have been NO incidences of ID checkpoints for purposes of verifying immigration status anywhere on CTA by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service (nor any other agency) on our system. We do not participate in or support this activity.”
DePaul senior Jack Klein lives near the Addison Red Line stop and said he didn’t see “a stronger police presence than usual on the day these fake reports happened.
He did, however, see a number of posts on social media warning about the fake immigration raids.
“I probably saw 10 to 15 Facebook posts saying the same stuff about ICE at train stops,” Klein said. “I thought they were real at first but people started posting skepticism in the comments and I realized that the people that were sharing them probably weren’t fact checking (the reports) but rather sharing them to do their own part. But it’s actually hindering a cause, most likely.”
In These Times: The Deadly Reality of Construction Work by Michael Arria
Construction worker deaths are rising in New York and Latinos are especially at risk.
That’s according to a new report, released last month, by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH). Between 2006-2015, at least 464 construction workers died while on the job in New York. The study also found safety violations at more than 68 percent of construction site inspections. The penalties for such infractions are small.
Released in the shadow of Donald Trump’s controversial executive orders on immigration, the report identifies the specific vulnerabilities of being a Latino construction worker. While Latinos made up just 30 percent of the construction workforce in 2015, they accounted for 57 percent of the fatalities due to falls.
“[Latinos] are more likely than non-Latinos to die on the job due to cases of extreme employer recklessness and disregard for human life, and they are more likely to die from fatal falls,” the report reads. “They are also more likely to be victims of wage theft, experiencing dual exploitation by their employers.”
The report also exposes the difference between union and nonunion job sites. As recently as the 1980s, almost all residential projects in the city were constructed with union labor. That is no longer true. A 2014 study showed that only 30 percent of mid- and high-rise residential and hotel projects used union concrete workers, exclusively.
Mic: MLB player Dexter Fowler faces outrage after saying his Iranian wife has been hurt by Muslim ban by Eric Lutz
St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Dexter Fowler, a star player during the Chicago Cubs World Series-winning season last year, is standing by his recent comments calling President Donald Trump's Muslim ban "unfortunate," despite vicious — and sometimes racist — online backlash.
Fowler, whose wife was born in Iran, told ESPN that his sister-in-law had recently delayed returning from a business trip to Qatar for fear of being detained, and that his family has put off taking Fowler's young daughter to visit family in Iran because of Trump's executive order.
"It's huge," Fowler said. "Especially any time you’re not able to see family, it's unfortunate."
The all-star's comments about how his family has been impacted by Trump's executive order — which is currently being blocked by federal courts — faced a torrent of backlash from fans who told Fowler to "be quiet play ball" and to "go back where you came from." Commenters also called on the Cardinals to "trade his black ass!" and described him as "property" of the team.
But Fowler, who is from Atlanta, is not backing down, tweeting that "athletes are humans, and not properties of the team they work for."
Vice: America Has Been Screwing Over Its Veterans Since the Revolutionary War by Mark Hay
Jackie Kilby, an archives technician at the National Archives, was parsing old letters to the US State Department when a name caught her eye: Caleb Brewster, a key member of George Washington's Culper Spy Ring, recently made famous by the AMC show Turn. The Long Island sailor-turned-revolutionary's 1792 letter to President Washington recounted how, on 7 December 1782, five years into his service, he'd led a battle against three British ships near Fairfield, Connecticut. During the encounter, Brewster took a musket ball to the chest, an injury noted in Washington's own journal. Three months later, the partially recovered Brewster led another attack on a British vessel, aggravating his wound. He was incapacitated—"confined two years & a half under distressing [surgical] operations & a most forlorn hope of cure," as he put it in his letter. The injury, sustained in the service of the very foundation of America, had left him with a long-term disability.
The rest of Brewster's story would be frustratingly familiar to veterans born two centuries later.
Guardian: US libraries join struggle to resist the Trump administration by Danuta Kean
US president Donald Trump could have saved himself some embarrassment this week if he had consulted his local library rather than Fox News before mentioning terror attacks in Sweden. For across the country, librarians have stepped in to verify facts and authenticate web content in a bid to counter fake news reports.
Not that he would have felt welcome, because the profession has placed itself in the vanguard of resistance to his policies on refugees and immigration, according to Elizabeth Flock of PBS Newshour. The intervention follows the president’s executive orders banning immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries and threatening to pull federal funding from cities that defy the ban.
The move reflects the key role libraries play in the lives of new Americans, with more than half visiting the institutions at least once a week, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a point made by the American Library Association (ALA) at the end of last month when it condemned the immigration ban.
Reuters: U.S. Homeland Security employees locked out of computer networks: sources by Dustin Volz
Some U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees in the Washington area and Philadelphia were unable to access some agency computer networks on Tuesday, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
It was not clear how widespread the issue was or how significantly it affected daily functions at DHS, a large government agency whose responsibilities include immigration services, border security and cyber defense.
In a statement, a DHS official confirmed a network outage that temporarily affected four U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) facilities in the Washington area due to an "expired DHS certificate."
Reuters first reported the incident earlier Tuesday, which a source familiar with the matter said also affected a USCIS facility in Philadelphia.
Employees began experiencing problems logging into networks Tuesday morning due to a problem related to domain controllers, or servers that process authentication requests, which could not validate personal identity verification (PIV) cards used by federal workers and contractors to access certain information systems, according to the source.
Some employees were able to access systems through a virtual private network. It was not clear if other branches of DHS were affected.
Guardian: One converted to Islam, the other went to far-right rallies: a modern tale of two brothers by Harriet Sherwood
In their youth, brothers Shaun and Lee did what they describe as the usual things: “getting wrecked” – drink, drugs, clubbing, gambling. “The party was always at our house, put it that way. And I was the host,” said Shaun.
But Shaun has since become Abdul, a convert to Islam whose life is governed by his devotion to Allah and the strict demands of his faith. Meanwhile, Lee travelled around the country to anti-Muslim rallies organised by the English Defence League. The brothers have taken starkly different directions. But Abdul told the Observer: “I know Lee loves me and I love him.”
The brothers’ story is told in a three-part Channel 4 series, Extremely British Muslims. Based on a year of filming in and around BirminghamCentral Mosque, one of the biggest in the UK, it aims “to show what ordinary Muslims’ lives are like beyond the negative headlines”, said series producer Fozia Khan.
Discover: Suicide Robot Boat Blamed for Attack on Warship by Jeremy Hsu
A suicide boat attack that killed two sailors aboard a Saudi warship was apparently carried out by an unmanned, remotely-controlled boat. The U.S. Navy says the incident likely represents the first ever use of a suicide robot boat as a weapon on the high seas.
Suicide boat bombings carried out by human crews willing to die in the attacks are nothing new. Such an attack killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 others aboard the U.S.S. Cole, a U.S. Navy destroyer refueling in the port of Aden, Yemen on Oct. 20, 2000. But the deadly debut of the suicide robot boat as first reported by Defense News shows how fairly cheap weapons can be deployed against much more advanced warships without even requiring a human “martyr” to pilot the suicide boat.
This first known use of a suicide robot boat was carried out by Houthi rebels fighting against Yemeni government forces in a brutal civil war that has lasted since early 2015. The rebels targeted a Saudi missile frigate called Al Madinah while it was on patrol off the coast of Yemen. Saudi Arabia is leading a Middle Eastern coalition of Sunni Arab countries that has been supporting the government with both airstrikes and a naval blockade aimed at putting down the Houthi insurgency.
Video taken from the deck of the Saudi missile frigate shows the robot boat careening directly into the rear of the warship and exploding near its helicopter pad. That video was first obtained by the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) News.
Bloomberg: Tale of ‘El Caballo’ Lays Bare Argentina’s Culture of Corruption by Charlie Devereux
For a quarter century, one man ruled the Rio Parana, the mighty Mississippi of Argentina.
His name is Omar Suarez. Along the Parana, the nation’s pipeline for key exports including soybeans, corn and wheat, he is better known as El Caballo: a hard-charging horse.
Little moved down the river unless Suarez, a union boss, received tribute, authorities say. For crews and companies alike, El Caballo epitomized the culture of corruption that has held back Argentina’s economy for decades.
Today, the story of El Caballo is, in a way, playing out across the country. President Mauricio Macri is working to stamp out ingrained graft that has long thwarted foreign investment. His effort is part of a broader attempt to break with Argentina’s painful history of misguided economics, populist Peronism and international default.
The task is enormous. Since succeeding the scandal-plagued Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in 2015, Macri has eased trade tariffs and restored Argentina’s access to capital markets. But he has struggled to deliver the quick economic revival he promised. With legislative elections looming, 2017 could be a pivotal year.
Columbia Journalism Review: A man of God in the Philippines is helping document a bloody war on drugs by Joe Freeman
The overwhelming majority of the 100 million people that make up the population of the Philippines are Catholic. Brother Jun, 46, is from the Roman Catholic order called the Redemptorists, who are known globally for their missionary work. He’s a “brother,” not a priest, which means he can give sermons but can’t lead mass. Brothers spend more time in the field and in the community. Vincent Go, the Filipino photographer sitting in the front seat next to Brother Jun, said they’re like the Marines—the tip of the spear.
Brother Jun is also a longtime photographer, and as a result, he has one foot in two influential institutions in the Philippines: the church and the media. By day, he attends to religious duties at a parish in Manila. After hours, he goes into the field as one of the dozens of “nightcrawlers” documenting President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drug dealers and users. Since Duterte took office seven months ago, more than 7,000 people have been killed in official police operations and vigilante killings tied to the crackdown. But as bodies keep appearing in the streets, complaints are growing at home. Through his humanitarian work and photojournalism, Brother Jun occupies a unique position in the fight to document the drug war and help its victims. He is a bridge between two worlds, and his unusual role shows how nontraditional journalism can serve the public interest while working in tandem with the mainstream media.
OK, tired of The Occupant, tired of Milo, and tired of all of this awful news, generally.
So….come with me...
New York Review of Books (NYR Daily blog): The True History of Fake News by Robert Darnton
In the long history of misinformation, the current outbreak of fake news has already secured a special place, with the president’s personal adviser, Kellyanne Conway, going so far as to invent a Kentucky massacre in order to defend a ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. But the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.
Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century AD churned out dubious information, known as Anecdota, which he kept secret until his death, in order to smear the reputation of the Emperor Justinian after lionizing the emperor in his official histories. Pietro Aretino tried to manipulate the pontifical election of 1522 by writing wicked sonnets about all the candidates (except the favorite of his Medici patrons) and pasting them for the public to admire on the bust of a figure known as Pasquino near the Piazza Navona in Rome. The “pasquinade” then developed into a common genre of diffusing nasty news, most of it fake, about public figures.
Quartz: Thanks to Brexit, even Oxford is thinking of absconding to France by Amy X. Wang
With the UK soon leaving the European Union, many British teenagers are looking elsewhere for their future studies. It turns out British universities are also considering going abroad.
Back in the fall, several UK institutions expressed interest in opening outpost campuses in EU countries, a move that would kill three birds with one stone by allowing schools to retain staff only authorized to work in the EU, keep up smooth partnerships with European schools, and maintain the flow of foreign grant money. Now one target country has been set: France.
Former French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer confirmed rumors this week that French institutions are working to give several British universities a second home.
Among those universities is Oxford, the oldest school in the country, which has never operated a foreign branch in its 700-year history. French officials say an Oxford outpost in Paris would automatically obtain legal status and would continue receiving EU funding after Brexit; construction could begin as soon as 2018.
Smithsonian (via TheConversation): The True Friendship That Saved Abraham Lincoln’s Life by Charles B. Strozier
In the spring of 1837, a “long, gawky, ugly, shapeless man” walked into Joshua Speed’s dry goods store in Springfield, Illinois, requesting supplies for a bed. Speed said the cost would be US$17, which ended up being too pricey for the visitor, who asked instead for credit until Christmas. The 23-year-old Speed was nonetheless taken with this stranger; he “threw such charm around him” and betrayed a “perfect naturalness.”
The stranger was none other than a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln, a quarter-century before he would take the oath as the 16th U.S. president.
Speed spontaneously came up with an alternative plan. He said he had a large room upstairs above the store and a double bed he was happy to share. Without a word, Lincoln picked up saddlebags that contained his life’s possessions and walked upstairs. He came back down and said, with a big smile, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.”
So began what would become one of the most important friendships in American history. It was a friendship that proved redemptive for Lincoln, helping him through two serious, suicidal bouts of depression that threatened his relationship with his future wife and his political ambitions. It is a story I tell in my new book, “Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The Enduring Friendship of Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed.”
New York Times: In a Walt Whitman Novel, Lost for 165 Years, Clues to ‘Leaves of Grass’ by Jennifer Schuessler
“A RICH REVELATION,” the ad began, teasing a rollicking story touching on “the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in Wall-st.,” and “graphic Sketches of Men and Women” (presented, fear not, with “explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about”).
Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper.
It was a less than tantalizing brew, perhaps. The story, which was never reviewed or reprinted, appears to have sunk like a stone.
But now comes another rich revelation: The anonymously published tale was nothing less than a complete novel by Walt Whitman.
The 36,000-word “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,” which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is being republished online on Monday by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.
Hyperallergic: A Western Cultural History of Pink, from Madame de Pompadour to Pussy Hats by Sarah Archer
Visitors to the official website of the Pussyhat Project are welcomed with an exclamation of color and joy from founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman: “We did it! We created a sea of pink!” And indeed they did. The Women’s March on Washington, D.C., and the 600 allied marches across the United States and the world, drew between 3.3 and 4.6 million protesters, making it one of the largest single-day demonstrations in the nation’s history. Suh and Zweiman launched the Pussyhat Project in advance of the march with the goal of having one million hats on hand, and their website includes PDF patterns for knit, sewn, and crocheted versions, which have collectively been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The resulting sea of cat hats caused a run on pink yarn across the country and quickly became a powerful visual shorthand for this particular swath of anti-Trump protest movements.
The message of the color pink is so powerful that it rarely needs explanation. We all know what it implies: it’s feminine, frilly, cheery, and delicate, certainly not a color we expect to see on, say, the cover of a scientific journal. It is often used to stand in for character development, as in the 2001 movie Legally Blonde, in which it’s implied that the pink-clad sorority girl Elle Woods, who carries a pink-accessorized chihuahua for good measure, can’t possibly be serious about applying to Harvard Law School. A claque of superficial teenage girls is similarly characterized in the 2004 film Mean Girls (“On Wednesdays, we wear pink,” says the alpha.) Unlike red, which flexibly symbolizes both Communism and the GOP, pink is so precisely coded that it’s almost impossible to misunderstand its intent. For this reason, pink tends to be either loved or loathed.
The Root: Maya Angelou’s Son and Grandson Explain Why a Documentary on Such a ‘Phenomenal Woman’ Is So Necessary Now by Ronda Racha Penrice
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Some people’s lives are bigger than they are; that was certainly the case with Maya Angelou. This “phenomenal woman” packed in a lot of living even for someone blessed with a relatively long journey of 86 years. That’s what’s most clear in the first-ever documentary on her life, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise,airing Tuesday on PBS’s American Masters.
Thanks to her classic memoir,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s many fans are familiar with her early childhood in Jim Crow-era Stamps, Ark., as well as her formative years spent in San Francisco. Others may have encountered her much later on
The Oprah Winfrey Show. And scores more surely know her for delivering the inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning” when Bill Clinton became president in 1993. And in black communities across the nation, her poems “
Phenomenal Woman” and “
Still I Rise” have electrified church programs and neighborhood gatherings for decades.
Many, however, don’t know what happened in between. They may have heard that she knew and worked with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Or that James Baldwin was one of her dearest friends. But even these relationships and the richness they gave her life only scratch the surface. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise digs into those crevices and delivers an overview that far exceeds one woman’s remarkable transit.
Loudwire: Frances Bean Cobain Thanks Kurt Cobain for ‘Gift of Life’ on Late Musician’s 50th Birthday by Joe DeVita
Yesterday, Feb. 20, marked what would have been the 50th birthday of Nirvana icon Kurt Cobain. The lasting impact of his music speaks for the legacy he left, but on this special day Kurt’s daughter found time to remark how grateful she was for something other than the the music: life.
Posting a handwritten note from the heart on her Instagram page (seen below), Frances Bean Cobain wrote, “Today would have been your 50th birthday. You are loved and you are missed. Thank you for giving me the GIFT of life. Forever your daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.”
Frances also corresponded with her grandmother yesterday, delighting in being raised by someone so “strong and compassionate.” Posting a screenshot of the text conversation on Instagram (seen below), ‘Grams’ responded, “Ohhhh, what beautiful words, from his beloved daughter. You were such a caring, loving little girl and have turned into such a beautiful young woman, he would be so ‘smugly’ proud of you, saying, ‘Yeah that’s MY daughter.’ I love you with all my heart. Thank God you were here for me to love and care for.”
Vice: The Revolution Will Be Weird and Eerie by Yohann Koshy
The simplest way to distinguish between the "weird" and the "eerie", the late Mark Fisher writes, is to think about the difference between presence and absence. Weirdness is produced by the presence of "that which does not belong". It shouldn't, or couldn't, exist – and yet there it is. Think of the montage techniques of Surrealist art or the fact of Donald Trump's Presidency.
Eeriness, however, is produced when something is absent: "We find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human." Think of an empty housing estate, its residents "decanted" by the council to make way for luxury flats, cranes rotating silently above. Weirdness abounds at the edge between worlds; eeriness radiates from the ruins of lost ones.
Fisher's short book of essays, The Weird and The Eerie, is developed from arguments he made on his iconic K-Punk blog, and looks at how the weird and the eerie work their way through popular culture. Like so much of his writing, it is lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets.
Discover: This Squid Gives Better Side-Eye Than You by Elizabeth Preston
Yes, this cephalopod is looking at you funny. It’s a kind of cockeyed squid—an animal that looks like some jokester misassembled a Mr. Potato Head. One of the cockeyed squid’s eyes is big, bulging and yellow. The other is flat and beady. After studying more than 25 years’ worth of undersea video footage, scientists think they know why.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California has been dropping robotic submarines into the ocean for decades. The footage from those remotely operated vehicles gets annotated and compiled into a database that’s been used for hundreds of research projects, says Katie Thomas, a graduate student at Duke University. She decided to delve into this database to figure out why the cockeyed squid is so symmetrically challenged.
In footage that dated back to 1989, Thomas and her coauthors found videotaped encounters with 152 Histioteuthis heteropsis and 6 Stigmatoteuthis dofleini. These are two of the 18 species of cockeyed squid. (They didn’t try to identify individual animals—due to “the vastness of the habitat,” they write, it’s unlikely that their robots ran into the same squid twice.)
Vulture: Demi Moore Will Play a Treacherous Nurse With a Dark Past on Empire by Jackson McHenry
Get ready to watch Demi Moore betray Taraji P. Henson (we assume), slap Terrence Howard (the odds are on it happening), and throw a drink in at least two different people’s faces (we are willing to place bets about this). Moore has booked a “major recurring role” on season four of Empire playing a “take-charge nurse with a mysterious past” who gets “ever more treacherously entangled with the Lyon family” as things progress — hopefully she can hang out with her daughter Rumer Willis, who is also on the show, at some point. Moore will first appear in the season three finale. If we don’t start getting promos that read, “Empire already had drama. Now it’s getting Moore,” Fox should fire its whole publicity department.
FiveThirtyEight: Magic Johnson Is The Lakers’ Only Star by Chris Herring and Kyle Wagner
This part of the NBA calendar typically sees players changing addresses more often than team executives. So it’s an abrupt change of pace to see the Los Angeles Lakers name Magic Johnson their new president of basketball operations, thus pushing out general manager Mitch Kupchak and executive vice president of basketball operations Jim Buss just two days before the trade deadline. The move has instant ramifications for how the Lakers will run their business, and may have even more drastic implications for the future of the franchise’s young players.
It’s unclear exactly what sort of team president Johnson will make. But he’s laid out a few thoughts explaining his shortcomings, and how he may ultimately handle the job.
Johnson, who once played for, coached and held ownership stake in the Lakers, acknowledged this month that he doesn’t have a firm grasp of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement or the salary cap. He added he’s been spending time getting up to speed. (Brushing up on tampering rules — which he violated last year— might be a good idea, too.)
Johnson has also been clear in saying he’d like to recruit friend and fellow Lakers legend Kobe Bryant to join him in the front office. (There are reports circulating that Bryant’s player agent, Rob Pelinka, is the frontrunner to replace Mitch Kupchak as the team’s general manager.) He and the Lakers will need to walk a fine line if they make an untraditional hire like Pelinka, or someone else who’s never served in such a capacity. The struggling Knicks, currently led by ex-Lakers coach Phil Jackson, have learned the hard way that things can get bumpy when a pair of people at the top of the organization take jobs they’ve never had to do before.
The Daily Illini: Bathroom graffiti is an art form for some students by Meral Aycicek
Artists prefer different canvases, whether it be the blank page of a sketchbook or an untouched block of marble.
A popular option for aspiring artists on campus is the anonymous surface of a bathroom stall.
Eduardo Martinez, junior in LAS, started a blog called UIUC Graffiti for a class last semester. He said he started the blog to focus mainly on bathroom graffiti and to see if there was something significant about the bathroom graffiti that blog writers could analyze.
“The way I view graffiti, it’s the voice of counter culture,” he said.
He has seen everything, from swastikas to empowering quotes, while photographing various campus bathrooms.
“I think people write on bathroom walls because it’s such a place of anonymity,” Martinez said. “If someone has a radical opinion but they’re not so outspoken about, or they’re afraid of getting backlash, they’ll just put it on a bathroom wall and see what happens, get a response.”
He described bathroom walls as the perfect medium for people who have a message or opinion they can’t post or discuss anywhere else.
Don’t forget that Mr. Meteor Blades is hosting anopen thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!