As this article alludes to, part of what we’re seeing is the cozification of media writ large: the desire, in these times, to swaddle the mind. I don’t believe that to be literature’s purpose, and I worry this is not so much a gateway to reading as it is a separate entrance entirely.
![For non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post's
"Fatal Force" database) - and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights movement - the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael]
Brown (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media, thwarted any sell-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama's second administration.
Huh? In addition to such passages, "Summer of Our Discontent" includes many distended excerpts - some spanning three pages - from not-so-obscure sources, including The Times.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6ga2y2trlwoftyiewoaa6f5u/bafkreihelcngz4zrlm2d6ythph3ntpdznv4ugxdh6737xkvg2a2o5dbx74)
