Portrait – Page 2 – Abnormal Capitalist

XXXTentacion’s Death Is a Reminder to Mourn, but Not to Forget

As the rapper Jidenna tweeted, “For those who are so woke that their compassion is asleep, remember this…if Malcolm X was killed at the age of 20, he would have died an abuser, a thief, an addict, and a narrow-minded depressed & violent criminal. So, I believe in change for the young.” His point is not to equate XXXTentacion with Malcolm X, but to put some perspective that young and lost souls can sometimes evolve into something greater given the opportunity. Whether XXXTentacion would have made good for his wrongs we’ll never know.

And from The Atlantic :

XXXTentacion may have spent his career trying to convince his most ardent young fans that they’re worth more than they believe, but his legacy—of trauma endured and seemingly unrepentantly inflicted—reminds us that worth has never been distributed evenly.

→ HighSnobiety

This Is Danny Pearl’s Final Story

“What is grief?” I recently asked psychologist Steven Stosny, posing the obvious question I’d avoided for so long.

“It’s an expression of love,” he told me. “When you grieve, you allow yourself to love again.”

“How do you grieve?” I asked him.

“You celebrate a person’s life by living your life fully.”

• • •

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed never said a word to the court in Guantánamo that day. When the last words of the 88-page charge sheet were finally read at 10:28 pm, 13 hours and 5 minutes after the proceeding began, the judge cracked his gavel and just like that the arraignment came to a swift, odd end.

KSM stood up and smiled, and I watched as he picked up a stack of books draped with his tazbi, his prayer beads. A minute later, he was gone. And what was I left with?

Relief. Relief that I could finally feel sad that Danny would never come back.

→ Washingtonian

The Life and Death of the Kid Who Hunted the Taliban

That night, as darkness enveloped the family’s three-story mud-brick compound, Wasil’s uncles shuffled Hamidullah’s bloodied corpse inside. The boy drew close, his cheeks wet with tears. In the low light, he could see the blood that stained his father’s clothes. He was a child, yes, but he knew enough of his world to realize, without even asking, who had killed his father. And he knew what it meant for him.

In the weeks that followed, Wasil’s anger hardened into a grim and brutal ambition—one that would launch him toward fame and then toward tragedy. “Teach me how to shoot,” Wasil said to his uncle Samad when he had resolved himself to retribution. “I want to kill my father’s killer.”

→ GQ

The Twin Prime Hero

Yitang “Tom” Zhang spent the seven years following the completion of his Ph.D. in mathematics floating between Kentucky and Queens, working for a chain of Subway restaurants, and doing odd accounting work. Now he is on a lecture tour that includes stops at Harvard, Columbia, Caltech, and Princeton, is fielding multiple professorship offers, and spends two hours a day dealing with the press. That’s because, in April, Zhang proved a theorem that had eluded mathematicians for a century or more. When we called Zhang to see what he thought of being thrust into the spotlight, we found a shy, modest man, genuinely disinterested in all the fuss.

On solving an unsolvable problem :

Q : Did you experience any emotions when you realized you’d solved the problem?
A : Not so much. I am a very quiet person.

Q : Were you excited?
A : A little. Not too much.

Edit : Here’s a link to a documentary on Yitang : Counting From Infinity.

→ Nautilus