Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz discuss the heart-wrencing last episode of The Wire on Slate. Here and here.
Kotlowitz offers a trenchant quote from Nelson Algren, the great Chicago novelist:
“We are willing, in our right-mindedness, to lend money or compassion—but never so right-minded as to permit ourselves to be personally involved in anything so ugly. We’ll pay somebody generally to haul garbage away but we cannot afford to admit that it belongs to us.”