London

My father sits back trying to recall my first walk across the tightrope, the initial plunge, the consequent falls, however you want to mark the spot. Perhaps I was never steady, thrown off course long ago. My mother, refusing to allow my faith to disappear, repeats a story I have often heard: I was dying inside her and just when doctor, nurse, and family gave up, I didn’t. Instead, I chose to cry and scream and claim my place among my race. She smiles as she tells this as if to say, you have always defeated the worst.

Winkler describes these disparate events in impressive detail. She offers a chilling description of how abysmal government policies, combined with a bout of truly terrible weather, created the slaughterhouse effects of 1952. She writes with verve and sympathy about a handful of Christie’s victims, and seems to capture with disturbing accuracy the killer’s mental state as he commits and then hides the evidence of his monstrous crimes. 

Beyond the media spectacle and daily tourists, a parallel world exists within London. A world that seems not to observe the visitor. A reality away from the opulence, the speed and the cosmopolitan daily routine. These are neighbors, people with experiences, or those with more or less truncated lives. People who move silently, unheard, ubiquitous among visitor masses, blind and hardworking.

While previous modes of discipline were more hidden and implicit in state control, the development of CCTV could be identified as a shift to a physical, identifiable sign of mass surveillance that has been developing for several centuries. This explicit form of surveillance certainly hints at ominous trends in Western society, which has sparked countless Orwellian allusions to Big Brother, but it may also offer an opportunity for change. 

Suschitzky's photograph is one of 150 London street photos featured in the book London Street Photography 1860-2010 –which was published in the U.K. last year to compliment a touring exhibit of the same name. The exhibit closed last month at the Museum of the City of New York, but the book is still available through Dewi Lewis Publishing. The collection features more than 70 photographers and spans three centuries – from the industrial revolution to the dawn of the information age – offering a glimpse of modern British history through the microcosm of life on its streets and avenues. 

While contactless credit cards have been available since 2008, when Barclaycard first released them, the actual usage of the cards has been very low. In fact, recent studies have found that of all the people that have contactless cards in their wallets, only a quarter have actually used them. That equates to around 5 percent of the UK population having actually used contactless payment. That's a  low figure in anyone's book - especially for a technology that's been around for more four years.

Throughout NW, Smith demonstrates a deep understanding of the constant ebb and flow of human relationships—between mothers and daughters, between best friends, between a reformed addict determined to stay clean and his flamboyant, drug-using ex-girlfriend.  Even forewarned of an impending tragedy, the reader becomes so absorbed in these characters’ lives that when  calamity does strike, it comes as a breathtaking surprise and with a penetrating sense of loss.

To travel, to really lose oneself in a new setting, is, after all, to subvert. In that C-130 full of refugees, I was moving not only across the ocean but also from one set of psyche to another. Yesterday my inheritance was simple -- the sacred rice fields and rivers, what once owned me, defining who I was. Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but a matter of scheduling. My imagination, once bound by a singular sense of geography, expanded its reference points across the border toward a cosmopolitan possibility.