Dave Eggers opens the magazine with this story. No matter how much or little you know about Sarajevo, ‘When They Learned to Yelp’ leaves you feeling connected to the lives of the people there.
 

“To yelp: open your mouth. Convulse your stomach, as you would before a belch, or before vomiting. Now form a word, a thousand words, but emit none. In places of the words you might attempt, make a sound. The sound is a combination of these three sound.”
 

Dave Eggers wrote a story called ‘When They Learned to Yelp’ about a generation of Westerners that only recently ‘yelped’ for the first time. This sound happens involuntarily when faced with the combination of pain, exhaustion, and powerlessness. Many of us first yelped as we watched planes fly into the twin towers in New York City, or as we watched dirty, bloody faces appear from Underground stations after the London bombings. We were late yelpers, Eggers says, compared with most generations in most places in the world. But it isn’t foreign to us. The magazine opens with Eggers’ story because no matter how much or little you know about Sarajevo, ‘When They Learned to Yelp’ leaves you feeling connected to the lives of the people there.

More about Dave Eggers here.
 

The painting is Sarajevo by Alyse Radenovic.