The Politics of Polio

A “Daily Comment” for The New Yorker on how, and why, the map of polio’s resurgence is a map of modern political violence. Photograph via Polio Canada/Ontario March of Dimes.

Hiroshima: An Anniversary

Sixty-nine years ago last week, a slender woman named Tomiko Shoji was struck and sent aloft by a bright white light. She’d just arrived at her secretarial job, at a tobacco factory, and was standing by the door when the flash occurred; the light’s source had a nickname, Little Boy, but it meant nothing to her at the time. She flew backward under the crushing force of the office door, passed out, and awoke with shards of glass in her head and an expanse of bodies around her—some dead, some alive but dazed, and many more, she soon found, floating “like charcoal” in nearby rivers. The nineteen-year-old climbed up and out of the shell of her younger self; she had survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Nearly seven decades later, Keni Sabath, Shoji’s youngest granddaughter, started to wonder: Had the bombing’s aftermath reshaped not just the psyche of her bachan (grandmother), but also her own?

Read my interview with Shoji and her family for The New Yorker here — it’s a story about the inter-generational transmission of trauma, which many war survivors/veterans and their families may recognize. Photograph via Popperfoto/Getty.