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Interesting profile on British classics scholar Mary Beard.
For all her openness to interaction, Beard has found it useful to
respond to many of her critics personally and privately—to take the
brawl inside. An early online experience was instructive. Just after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Beard was asked by the London
Review of Books to contribute her thoughts. She argued, astringently,
that it served little purpose to decry the attacks as “cowardly,” or to
go no further in analyzing the motivations of the perpetrators than to
call them terrorists: “There are very few people on the planet who
devise carnage for the sheer hell of it. They do what they do for a
cause; because they are at war.” The attacks needed to be understood not
merely as an atrocity but as a response to Western foreign policy, and
she alluded to a common sentiment in her community—“that, however
tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming.” She
received angry e-mails from correspondents who understood her to have
callously suggested that the workers in the Twin Towers deserved to die.
full: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer
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