Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Aside from being one of the youngest men ever to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, MLK also wrote several books and numerous articles to promote peace and equality. His efforts cost him a bomb to his home, subjection to personal abuse and numerous arrests, but he still traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times just to appear wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.
Celebrate him.
“I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected - an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There never had been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.”
- Marilynne Robinson
Song of the day: “Ain’t Nothing Like You (Hoochie Coo)” by BlakRoc
Anastassia Elias: “Neige”. More of Anastassia’s winsome toilet-paper tube dioramas can be found here.
via thedailywhat
The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League
How a high school dropout created the ultimate fake ID, scammed her way into Harvard and Columbia, and became the target of a nationwide manhunt.
Brooke Henson knew she was in trouble when she logged in to her e-mail account at Columbia University and found a message from the campus-security office. She stared at the computer screen, feeling that familiar anxiety rising. You’ll be fine, she reassured herself. Think positive thoughts, just like her therapist had taught her. Surely she would get out of this scrape the same way she’d gotten out of all the other ones: with smooth talk and little lies. OK, big lies.
She dialed campus security. “Hi,” she said, her voice controlled. “This is Brooke Henson.”
The officer told her that he had gotten a curious call from police detectives in South Carolina who were trying to crack a missing-person case. “There’s something I need to ask you,” the officer continued. “Are you Brooke Henson?” The young woman who had disappeared from the rural South Carolina town of Travelers Rest seven years earlier? The girl whose grieving family had been searching for her ever since? The Brooke Henson who was presumed murdered?
“Yes,” Brooke said into the phone. “That’s me.”
Her mind raced through her options. On the one hand, she had a purse full of proof that she was Brooke: her student ID, a Vermont driver’s license, a U.S. passport, an Ohio identification card, a South Carolina birth certificate. She had a part-time job, a rented apartment not far from campus on New York’s Upper West Side and a full course load at Columbia, all registered under the name Brooke Henson.
On the other hand, she wasn’t Brooke Henson.
She packed a suitcase hastily, grabbed her two Shih Tzus, hailed a cab and headed straight off the grid. By the time New York police came knocking with a DNA test, “Brooke Henson” was long gone.
Thus began an 18-month federal manhunt unusual in its scope and intensity. Investigators had never encountered anyone like this mysterious young woman, whom they discovered was not Brooke Henson at all but an imposter named Esther Reed: a criminal with an MO radically different from that of a typical identity thief. Rather than max out people’s credit cards and move on, Esther would becomethem, spending years living under a succession of assumed names. Posing as various young women, she got her GED in Ohio, aced her SATs in California, gained admission to three universities — including continuing-ed programs at Harvard and Columbia — and received $100,000 in student loans. Along the way, she duped countless people from coast to coast, from DMV clerks to college professors to the West Point cadets she dated.
“She’s a criminal genius,” says Jon Campbell, the South Carolina police detective who eventually exposed her trail of deceit. “She was manipulative, controlling, brilliant. We didn’t know what to make of her.” With so many unanswered questions, authorities treated Esther Reed’s disappearance as an all-out emergency, suspecting her not only of fraud but of murder and international espionage. The tabloids had a field day with this brazen girl who had conned her way into the Ivy League; front-page headlines worried over her whereabouts and wondered what dangerous secrets she might be keeping.
No one guessed the truth, which was simpler, and therefore stranger, than their wildest theories: that the scared young woman so hotly pursued by South Carolina police, the Secret Service, federal marshals and even the U.S. Army was actually on a bizarre and misguided journey of self-discovery. A 28-year-old high school dropout from Montana, Esther Reed just wanted to stop being Esther Reed and to embark on a new, better life of her own design. She was pursuing the American Dream, with a twist: Rather than forge a new identity from scratch, she would steal someone else’s and remake it to suit her own needs. Reed never imagined that her ill-conceived self-help program would land her onAmerica’s Most Wanted and brand her as a threat to national security — or that for one brokenhearted family in South Carolina, the fulfillment of her hopes and dreams would mean the end of their own.
Continue reading here.
Fascinating!
Song of the day: “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann
If there’s one song I live my life by, it’s this one.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
