Culture

When someone compliments me on my photography by saying what a nice camera I have, I immediately reply in my head, “It’s like telling me my stove makes good food.” I bristle when people say photography is just being in the right place at the right time. Many photography snobs whine about Instagram and Twitter and iPhone cameras and the...

Our society likes pictures. We take pictures of ourselves. Our children. Our houses. Our vacations. Our food. Our pets. Our friends. Our triumphs. Our failures. We’ll take pictures of pretty much anything. Every 2 minutes we take more pictures than all of humanity captured in the 19th century. According to numbers recently released by Facebook, we have uploaded about 240...

I still remember the day my brother didn’t answer his cell phone. On February 14, 2008, a local Chicago radio station reported that a shooter had gunned down several students at Northern Illinois University, the school that my brother David was then attending. Thank God for Dave’s penchant for working out: he was at the gym and not in Cole...

Fourteen-year-old Shin In Geun watched when North Korean military guards hanged his mother and shot his brother three times. Their crime: attempting to escape from Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea. As he watched them die, Shin knew he was responsible. The first rule of Camp 14 says, “Anyone caught escaping will be shot immediately.” On...