Posts tagged with news
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Letters to Newtown: Preserving 500,000 Messages of Hope & Sorrow
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones and Newtown resident Ross MacDonald. For more information about the Letters to Newtown project, follow MoJo’s newly-launched Tumblr.
Walk into the Newtown town hall, and you see bin after bin of cards and letters — some 500,000 at least, more arriving every day. They line both sides of the long main hall and fill up the branching halls and offices. Posters, paintings, quilts, and flags cover the walls. There are banners from students at Columbine and Virginia Tech; there are letters from school kids across America and from people as far away as France and Australia. And there are boxes of Kleenex on every table for those who read them.
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How a Gun Control Petition Went from Tumblr to Washington DC
I created the petition “Immediately address the issue of control through the introduction of legislation in Congress” as a knee-jerk reaction in mid-December of last year. It was a way of gaining control over a situation I had no control over. After the awful extent of the Sandy Hook shootings became clear, I felt disoriented. The mind tends to turn toward blame, but the murder of twenty children and six school officials was, and will always be, a hard thing to wrap my head around.
I knew that if there ever were a tipping point for effective gun control, this would be it. So, I wrote a petition. My primary goal was to appeal to both sides of the debate. Writing an incendiary, partisan petition benefits no one. The vast majority of gun owners are people who have the Constitutional right to own one, several, or many guns, and singling these people out was wrong. Simply put, the petition was intended to start a realistic dialogue about guns and their role in the United States. We have a gun problem, plain and simple.
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‘D’ Is for Divorce: Sesame Street Tackles Another Touchy Topic
This story was produced in partnership with Time.com
In early 1992, a census report predicted that 40 percent of children would soon live in divorced homes. As one of the most famous children’s television programs in the world, Sesame Street was determined to take on a topic most kid’s shows wouldn’t touch. They cast Snuffy, a.k.a. Mr. Snuffleupagus, for the part of child divorcee.
With a team of its best writers, researchers, and producers, a segment was scripted and shot. It went through a half-dozen revisions, with input from the foremost researchers in the field. And on a typical sunny afternoon on Sesame Street, the furry, red, elephantine muppet known as Snuffy prepared to drop the bomb on his loyal preschool viewers.
“My dad is moving out of our cave,” he confides to Big Bird one afternoon, distraught after knocking over a house built of blocks. “I’m not sure where,” he continues, crying. “Some cave across town.”
Big Bird, naturally, is horrified. “But why?” he asks his friend.
Snuffy blinks his long, dark eyelashes, and pauses. We know what’s coming. Well, he explains, “because of something called a divorce.”
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In Storm-Ravaged Rockaways, Voting — Against All Odds
At 6:45 a.m. the line was already a dozen deep as the polling super site in Far Rockaway, Queens, struggled to open. The gas for the electric generators, lights and six port-a-johns provided by FEMA had been stolen overnight. Poll workers fumbled with flashlights to set up the polling stations.
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Introducing: This Month in Charts
July 2012 brought the heat. We’ve decided to return the favor by bringing the first installment of the hottest new series on the whole internet, This Month in Charts. Brought to you by the folks at I Love Charts.
Starting Off with a Bang

July kicked off with the most explosive of holidays, especially if you happened to be attending the fireworks show in San Diego.
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Bir Dufan, Libya | July 15, 2012
Members of the Libyan Shield military unit from Zlitan patrol the volatile desert region bordering the pro-Gaddafi enclave of Bani Walid and revolutionary Misrata.
For the next week, conflict photographer Ben Lowy, on a grant from the Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, will be shooting from Libya on the first-ever photojournalism inspired Hipstamatic lens — and posting exclusively to Tumblr. Check out Lowy’s Tumblr and Storyboard for more. Also see our interview with the photographer.
(All photos by Benjamin Lowy/Getty Reportage)
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