Adrienne Rich

I hate to be a downer.  On the other hand, I really hate glossing over bad news.  With the constant coverage of Trayvon Martin, here are a few other sad stories of death that feel like they’ve been unfairly lost in the 24/7 infotainment shuffle.

• As severely underreported as it is sad is the murder of a mother of five, Shaima Alawadi.  Alawadi was found beaten in her San Diego home with a xenophobic note left next to her.  She died three days later.  The Daily Beast reports on the hate crime, here.
• Poet Adrienne Rich died March 27.  I think I carried an anthology of her poems around with me my entire senior year of highschool.  This New Yorker article discusses how relevant, to the point of prognostication, Rich’s verse has been.
• Art critic, Hilton Kramer also recently passed away.  Known to be a fierce defender of modernism (for example, calling conceptualism “scrapbook art”)  he’s enjoyable to read  though easy to disagree with.  The New York Times remembers him here.