While Butch Robs Trains

The Justice Department plans this week to release evidence of racial bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials. 

We were a little skeptical of the concept at first, but we ended up deciding to participate in Banned Books Week. Here are the books we’ve chosen to ban. If you really want one they’ll be available again next week.

In Search of Lost Time, Vols. 2-7

No one gets this far anyway.

The Maroon Bells wearing their fall colors as the Milky Way shines in a clear night sky. Another amazing photo by Jeremy Swanson. 

This is Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon. She died on September 1, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo. Shortly thereafter, her body was packed in ice and sent by railroad to Washington, DC, to become a part of the National Museum of Natural History’s collection as a lasting legacy of the harm that can be done to the natural world by humans. Just decades prior, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America. The disappearance of the species helped ignite the modern conservation movement.

For the Centennial of her death, Martha was recently brought out for display and is currently on view in the exhibition Once There Were Billions, Vanished Birds of North America. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Libraries in partnership with the National Museum of Natural History and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the exhibition tells the story of the last Passenger Pigeon, a member of a species that once numbered in the billions, along with the disappearance of the Great Auk, Carolina Parakeet, and Heath Hen. These extinctions reveal the fragile connections between species and their environment. 

The Smithsonian Libraries, National Museum of Natural History, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library will be hosting a Twitter Chat on September 2, 2014 from 2-3 pm Eastern Time. This is your chance to ask questions about the Passenger Pigeon, extinction, and biodiversity literature.

Summer isn’t over and there are still plenty of wildflowers up in the high country. So get outside, and go for a hike! 

“No one in the Midwest is familiar with the phrase ‘tall poppy syndrome,’ but the idea, which can be traced from Herodotus, is abundantly familiar: those that stand out are cut down.”

Welcome to What Would Twitter Do? the ninth and three-quarter edition with Roxane Gay! Next week will be Week 10, the final interview. In this series, I talk to some of my favourite people on Twitter about their Twitter philosophies and practices. Roxane Gay, in addition to being a brilliant fiction writer, blogger and essayist (this season she published her collection Bad Feminist to huge acclaim), is a seasoned and constant Twitter user. It’s possible that it was her, more than anyone else I follow, who made me begin to wonder: What is Twitter? She used the medium in the way other people did—posting links, declaring things—but in another way, too: as a constant running monologue, a real stream of consciousness, a literary Modernist on Twitter. There isn’t a sense of hierarchy among her now 80,000+ tweets. It almost seems part of her living—in the way that you wouldn’t say this breath is particularly important, while those twenty other breaths I took are less important. One begets the next. She was also maybe the first “Twitter celebrity” to me, in that I knew her “Twitter work” before I had read any of her other writing. She seems to be one those people always in centre of the swirl of the debate—especially around feminist issues—while also managing to stand cooly outside it.

—Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI: I remember when I first started following you, I couldn’t believe how often you tweeted. It’s not like you’d save up and tweet special thoughts. It was more like a constant stream for your life.

ROXANE GAY: Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it’s my mother, especially when I’m not teaching or on break. 

SH: Many of your thoughts must now just appear as tweets. Is that so? Is there a portion of your brain that is always tuned to tweeting?

RG: Hmm. There’s certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter. 

SH: Do you always tweet on your phone or from the website, too? 

RG: I tweet from my phone, the Twitter app on my computers, and once in a while, the website. 

SH: Do you care whether an individual tweet be “good,” or is more the overall approach that you think about?

RG: I don’t care. Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters. 

SH: What has tweeting done for you on a professional level? 

RG: Tweeting has definitely expanded the reach of my work.