When Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc., developed the Fyre app as a tool for booking music acts, he dreamed up a doozy of a promotion with rapper Ja Rule: Fyre Festival 2017, two weekends of sun, fun, and rock ’n’ roll on Norman’s Cay, a private island in the Bahamas. A promotional video of bikini models and speedboats promised an experience “on the boundaries of the impossible.”

Since joining Facebook about 10 years ago, I’ve collected a number of left-wing Facebook friends. Some I know personally, others only by casual friending sometime in the past. Though I seldom engage, they’re still on my feed because I want to know what they’re thinking.

State Rep. Ben Baker, of Missouri House District 160, is concerned about the kind of books kids may encounter at the local library. “I want to be able to take my kids to a library and make sure they’re in a safe environment,” where objectionable material can’t slip by a parent’s notice. To that end, his House Bill 2044 attaches the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act” to a routine funding measure.

“This book started with an image: a very formal butler standing on a stoop of a normal suburban house, on the first day of the oldest kid’s sixth-grade year, in the rain,” explained Gary D. Schmidt, author of Pay Attention, Carter Jones (Clarion Books, ages 10-12). “That whole image was there before anything else, and obviously, the question is: Why is he there?”

“Rebeka traced the shape of her curled feet through the blanket that covered her and her little sister, ­Medatrece. Everybody was asleep and she needed to go to the bathroom. She wanted to go by herself, without bothering anybody, but she was also afraid. Wild dogs roamed the Rwandan countryside after dark and could easily get into her yard.”

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

In his poem “Mother to Son,” Langston Hughes set one of his most vivid images. It might also describe the early life of another poet whose climb out of childhood was similarly studded with tacks, splinters, and “boards torn up.” In her teens a friend asked Nikki Grimes how she could still believe in God. “What kind of question is that? How could I not? If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even be here. I’d either be in prison, or the grave” (Ordinary Hazards).

Lovely War

by Julie Berry