What: Remember the Triangle Fire, a public memorial to mark 103rd anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, an industrial catastrophe that killed 146 workers and launched an international movement to ensure safety and health in the workplace. 

When: Noon-1pm, March 25, 2014.  

Where: Washington Place & Greene Street, Manhattan, NY.

Learn More: RememberTheTriangleFire.org, the website of the Triangle Fire Coalition. 

Caitlin Keefe Moran writes about her experiences as an abortion clinic escort for The Toast: 

We see the same protesters week after week. They drive in from a church almost twenty miles away, but always beat us there, until we begin to speculate that they just sleep outside the clinic the night before. The group is led by Pastor Creep (not pictured), a sixty-ish man with wire-rimmed glasses and, in the winter, a graying beard. He loves to riff on the Holocaust: “Just like the Nazis!” he bellows at Ruby, a fellow escort, and I as we walk a woman and her incredulous friend to the door. “Leading the Jews to the gas chamber. ‘Oh, you’re just going to take a shower!’ But they never came out!”

Miriam, another volunteer and the descendent of Holocaust survivors, checks her watch. “Seven thirty-five,” she says, “and we’re already on the Nazis.” [The Toast]

The protesters resort to every conceivable tool of psychological warfare from accusing women of being baby-killers, to belittling the manhood of their male partners, to telling escorts of color that they are race-traitors complicit in black genocide. On Moran’s first day, protesters taunted her for paying attention to a man who apparently committed suicide by leaping from the building across the street. 

Susan Zalkind’s boyfriend Erik was brutally murdered in 2011 and his killing was never solved. Erik was a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an obscure amateur boxer who would become infamous two years later as one of the Boston Marathon bombers. In her deeply-reported long form story in Boston Magazine, Zalkind argues that the marathon bombing might have been prevented if only the police had taken more interest in Tamerlan as a suspect in 2011. 

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[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]