“You gotta blame both sides,” he says. “The hate was preached on both sides. I didn’t teach my kids to hate like that. But apparently there were people in the neighborhood that did.”

In this week’s Chicago Reader, Steve Bogira concludes a heartbreaking two-part series about the racial violence that accompanied the integration of the Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in 1971. The racism that greeted the neighborhood’s first black families was appalling; the violence that snapped out of it was a tragic, misguided waste. The person who comes out looking the best is the one who lost the most. It’s incredibly sad, and well worth reading for a reminder of attitudes and actions that aren’t long buried.

Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.

Past Imperfect, the Smithsonian history blog, has a fascinating feature about Georg Elser, a carpenter who came within eight minutes of assassinating Hilter in 1939. It’s meticulous in describing the care with which Elser approached his bombing. It also questions the ethics of his indiscriminate attempt, even if Hitler was the target.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. Mark and his team were inside a downed helicopter at one corner, while James and his team were at the opposite end. The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.

In the New Yorker, Nicholas Schmidle has a fascinating overview of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “Getting Bin Laden” breaks down the planning, debates over intelligence and raid itself.

It also states, unambiguously, that killing Bin Laden was the ultimate goal. Regardless of how you feel about the targeted assassination*, the article offers an in-depth look at another world. Some disturbing details are revealed: our poisonous relationship with Pakistan, the increase in drone attacks under Obama and the fact that these types of raids are almost a nightly occurrence. It’s hard to see how the United States can step back from international raids being standard operating procedure, especially when the most prominent example was so effective.

* Just my two cents: I don’t object to Bin Laden’s murder, but I always favored the prospect of him being tried and jailed like any other criminal.

In the June 6 issue of the New Yorker, Sarah Stillman has a heartbreaking article exploring the world of “TCNs.” “Third-country nationals” are the bulk of the workers on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re recruited from poor nations, promised cushy jobs in Dubai and instead find themselves doing support work on American military bases.

The Army doesn’t even have direct oversight of the worker’s living conditions or wages, so both are dismal. Workers lived boxed together in shipping containers. There have been protest riots over the lack of food, and sexual assault is a common threat for female workers. The government seems to acknowledge that oversight is needed, but no one steps up to actually do it.

It’s another tragic byproduct of the desire to pinch pennies while keeping the American military enmeshed in two countries a world away. It’s a frustrating read, one that doesn’t inspire hope that things will change any time soon.

Yesterday, I read a South Bend Tribune profile of a prospective mayoral candidate. Bill Davis, a Republican no less, bears a history that has his thrown out of middle school for attacking a teacher, has spent time in prison for assault, and runs his campaign from a local flophouse where “communication at times has been difficult, if the minutes on their prepaid cell phone run out, because squirrels keep chewing through the phone line leading into their room.”

Naturally, he took nearly 40 percent of the vote in a 2008 race for St. Joseph County Commissioner.

Update: Now I feel bad—it seems he’s suffered a heart attack.