My parents-in-law, visiting from New Delhi, recently joined me in attending a public library screening of the sobering documentary “India's Daughter.”  The movie is banned there because of its controversial depiction of the brutal rape and killing of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012 – an event that led to mass protests and some reforms.

In many countries beyond India, the film can be viewed online.  It depicts several Indian perspectives on what are, alas, global problems of gender and socioeconomic inequality and violence.

Tanvi Misra reflected on the film earlier this year in the Atlantic.

Yesterday I had occasion to visit with my friend Anim Steel, a leader of a growing movement around the Real Food Challenge.  This organization – with campus chapters across the country – seeks to inspire a “generation” of young people pursuing objectives ranging from health and equity to sustainability. 

Anim’s wife, Sarita Daftary-Steel, directs another justice-oriented initiative: the El Puente Green Light District.

I recently read Princeton professor Imani Perry’s book More Beautiful and More Terrible – its title from James Baldwin – on “the embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the United States.”  Using an interdisciplinary approach, she aims to delineate and to counter “practices of racial inequality” in law, culture, and society.

On this holiday weekend, last night my wife, our kids, and I camped out in a tent together for the first time.  (We had stayed before in a rustic cabin but not a tent.)  The location was Greenfield State Park in southern New Hampshire, where the kids and I enjoyed an evening swim in Otter Lake before heading back to the tent.  Fortunately, it didn’t rain until this morning, by which time we were beginning to climb nearby Mount Monadnock.

This was at least my fourth hike of Monadnock, which is purportedly the most frequently climbed mountain in the U.S. (but my first since college).  Emerson and Thoreau were among the admirers of this peak, but you don’t have to be either a transcendentalist or a rock-climbing veteran to make the ascent.  That said, our family inadvertently took a more ambitious route, the “white arrow trail,” than in hindsight we would have chosen – particularly amid increasingly steady rain that made the rocks treacherous in places.  In the end, my son and I reached the peak – my wife and daughter, nearly.  It was a memorable experience from which we’ll learn.