From September 1964.

I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14—I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But 14 is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my 14 was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent. –“Diary,” Jenny Diski, London Review of Books

Let’s take a step back first, as I had to in the original article, to explain a literal red herring. Before modern refrigeration and speedy transport, fish could not be got to customers more than a few miles inland before it went bad. Various methods were invented for preserving them, using salting, smoking or pickling. Kippers are herrings that have been split, salted, dried and smoked. Yarmouth bloaters are made by a variation on kippering but are whole fish and do not keep so well. Arbroath smokies are smoked haddock. Red herrings are a type of kipper that have been much more heavily smoked, for up to 10 days, until they have been part-cooked and have gone a reddish-brown colour. They also have a strong smell. They would keep for months (they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but in this state they were inedible and had to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be heated and served. –“The Lure of the Red Herring,” World Wide Words, Michael Quinion (via)

“I don’t know why it’s like this, but it’s a rule: never ever approach the gallery directly. Never ever. I didn’t make this rule and I don’t want the world to be like this, but it is. Don’t ask for a studio visit, don’t ask to show them your work, don’t do anything. Sooner or later something will happen.” –“How to Make It As An Artist In New York 101,” Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer

Advertisement, January 1948.

“If you build a bridge to nowhere, that might be a bridge that you’re going to use that I’m not going to use,” said Ed Pound, spokesman for the government board charged with investigating waste and fraud in the stimulus package. “That’s not a call we’re going to make.” –“Eye on the Stimulus: Stimulus for cotton candy, tango and a fish orchestra? Wacky, or actually worthy?” by Michael Grabell, ProPublica

The Kcymaerxthaere is a vast alternate universe created by Eames Demetrios, a California-based artist and filmmaker who began installing the plaques in 2003. The premise of the project is that the Kcymaerxthaere exists as its own parallel world, but its remnants are often visible in our own, “linear” world—intersections that Demetrios endeavors to commemorate by physically marking their presence. He has already installed over sixty of these faux historical markers, and hopes to increase that number to seventy by the year’s end. Most are in the United States (that is, Kymaerica), while others dot the globe, materializing in Singapore, Spain, Dubai, and Australia. This August, Demetrios even lowered a plaque onto the ocean floor, under forty-five feet of water in the Garvellach Islands of Scotland. In addition to the plaques, there are lectures, websites, travel guides (including Discover Kymaerica), and bus tours. He funds the project through gallery shows that display photographs of the plaque sites, as well as “texture flags”—dense images of physical objects that he says are carried by the people of the Kcymaerxthaere as their national banners. Demetrios calls the project “three-dimensional storytelling,” and says that he hopes to mark some two thousand sites before he is through. –“Discover Kymaerica,” Michael A. Elliott, The Believer

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolaño. –“Bolaño Inc.,” Horacio Castellanos Moya, Guernica

Advertisement, October 1955.

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device. Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them. If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth. On Tuesday, a guard and a driver for The New York Times, both licensed to carry firearms, drove through nine police checkpoints that were using the device. None of the checkpoint guards detected the two AK-47 rifles and ammunition inside the vehicle. –“Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless,” Rod Nordland, The New York Times

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I’m the only one who matters! I’m not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever. This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn’t make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind. –“How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon: The perverse allure of a damaged woman,” Johann Hari, Slate

This doesn’t lead to “writing by committee.” My experience is that four minds are four times more inventive in a team than if each works alone. But this requires a conductor to keep the voices to tempo and tune, and the key to this is the showrunner—the head producer who has creative control of the series. Showrunners like David Chase (Sopranos), Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues) or John Wells (ER) helped carve out a space for collaboration. Time and money is also invested. In the US, beyond your individual scripts, you are paid a salary to come into a “writer’s room” and help the work of others. The Wire is a good example of the result. Conceived by David Simon, a former journalist, and homicide detective Ed Burns, the collaborative ethic allowed them to bring in voices from film writing and crime fiction­—such as Richard Price and George Pelecanos—without losing coherence. This ethos has made US television the preferred destination for a generation of great writers. After winning an Oscar with American Beauty, Alan Ball eschewed the big screen and created Six Feet Under for HBO. In the DVD commentary to the pilot, he describes handing in the edgy first draft to the head of the channel. Having been through the Hollywood studio mill, Ball expected the worst, but the only note he had back read: “Can you make it more fucked up?” Although we are blessed with a tradition of great television dramatists, there’s no way that Alan Bleasdale, Dennis Potter or Jimmy McGovern could have written a dozen episodes of a show alone. We have recently imported the idea of showrunners for the resurrection of Dr Who and Survivors, but their power is limited, and the principle of collaboration doesn’t penetrate the lower echelons. Script editors and producers take a dim view of you talking to another writer without tight supervision. There is no financial incentive either. Why make someone else’s episode great when it might make yours look less good? Given that the running order can be changed at the last moment by management fiat, those collectively crafted character developments and story arcs will be binned anyway. Just write your own episode and cash that cheque. –“Why Britain can’t do The Wire,” Peter Jukes, Prospect

From January 1964.

For all its no-nonsense masculinity, Hawksian cinema has always been very stylized. His array of adventures make their stoical gestures in an enclosed world where such gestures are sufficient unto themselves. Unfortunately, about half of “Red Line 7000″ consists of real footage of apparently suicidal stock-car racing in America, and it is harder to believe in the validity of stylized stoicism as a direct statement on the modern world. Hawks, unlike Preminger, has taken his studio-conditioned out-look out into the real world and there is consequently a fatal disharmony between the old movie myths he seeks to perpetuate and the insistent iconography of the modern world he is unable to ignore. Unlike Antonioni, Hawks believes that the sentiments of 1935 are appropriate to the cybernetic ’60s, but “Red Line 7000″ fails to establish his thesis. If Hawks has represented much of what I like in the cinema, Warhol represents much of what I resist. We live in an era when many people are as pathologically frightened of being put on as of being put down. Magazine articles are written to warn us of the perils of alleged artists who do not take their audience seriously, and Warhol is usually cited as the worst offender. I have found in the past that with me a little Warholian cinema goes a long way, but it suddenly strikes me that I have never seen anything by Warhol entirely lacking in interest. I happened to stumble into the Cinametheque one night in search of his Fire Island opus which is reportedly too salacious even for the American Civil Liberties Union. As a last minute replacement for the mysteriously unavailable Fire Island film, the management reprised “The Life Story of Juanita Castro,” which I had never seen, and it shook me up considerably simply by making me laugh for long stretches of time, not so much at it as with it. –“Clip Job : Sarris Considers Warhol,” Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, from December 1965

Marx never wrote about cellulite, though I am quite sure he suffered from this “unsightly condition.” He endured several excruciating physical ailments throughout his lifetime: carbuncles, insomnia, bronchitis, a bad liver, pleurisy and haemorrhoids. If he were alive today I am sure he would definitely have a few more “backaches” to contend with, the current cellulite epidemic being one of the many. It might be very much lagging in order of importance, but nevertheless an examination of this modern phenomenon vividly illustrates the manipulative powers of both advertising and marketing, two wasteful and exploitative processes which are an integral part of capitalism…. Advertising and marketing constitutes part of the modern system of production and consumption. Advertising in particular is the dominant cultural form in capitalist society. It mimics and subverts every genre of art and cultural practice to enhance and alter the meaning of lifeless objects. But advertisements do more than exaggerate the basic function of a product. They imbue products with all kinds of social abilities. Marx called this process the fetishism of commodities. But surely people buy a particular soft drink or breakfast cereal because they like its taste and are thirsty, hungry or want to keep regular: they are not hypnotised into thinking that they are going to be or have the beautiful woman in the TV commercial? But advertising does not adhere to such a crude formula. Utilitarian items such as food or drink become exaggerated props in advertisements that subtly portray or imply an ideal lifestyle. This ideal is not an outlandishly glamourous way of life. It is a comfortable and customary one which we can all realistically aspire to, one which the product will bring us nearer to. But some commodities bring us nearer to this coveted lifestyle than others. –“Marxism and Cellulite: A consumer’s guide to marketing,” Catherine Lyons, Red Banner: A magazine of socialist ideas

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, “The Fenimore Cooper Indian” (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson’s sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen. –“American Pastoral,” Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books

From May 1897.

What is claimed is: 1. A method of producing an advertisement with thematic content from a television program, comprising: incorporating thematic content comprising a plot advancing element of a television program into a product or service advertisement to form a program-integrated product or service advertisement, wherein the program-integrated product or service advertisement is broadcast in between segments of the television program, before a time slot of the television program or after the time slot of the television program, wherein the plot advancing element promotes the plan or pattern of events or the main story of the television program. –“Method and system for producing program-integrated commercials,” John L. Makowski, et al., (a patent on commercial product placement) U.S. Patent Number: 6859936, November 20, 2001

Every type of content has some quotient of participation value. At the bottom of the spectrum are games/shows/movies/events that you watch or attend by yourself, and you have no interest in telling anyone about. Those shows have zero participation value. They could be Perry Mason reruns or shows you watch when you have nothing better to do. At the top of the scale are games/shows/movies/events that potential viewers have predicted to have high participation value. These are events that we look forward to not only watching or attending, but that we plan in advance how we are going to extend our participation. We may plan on tweeting about it or posting a facebook update because we know our friends are there and we are bragging to each other, while at the same time showing off to friends who can’t be there. Think going to the opening of Cowboys stadium, or going to a concert or opening night of a movie, or watching the big game…. The higher the participation value, the shorter the shelf life. The role of the Internet for high participation games/shows/events is not to show them, its to enable the participation. The explosion of Social Networking and social networking enabled games and applications has strengthened this as the internet’s role. Its improving TV ratings of shows with high participation value. –“Sports Ratings Records and what it tells us about the Internet,” Mark Cuban, blogmaverick

My wife and I chose to settle in our Los Angeles neighborhood because it had everything a young family would want: shady, tree-lined streets, charming cottages and bungalows, lots of kids with involved parents. My instant affection for the place was based on all of those domestic details. And one summer several years ago, it turned into full-blown love when I went to my first neighborhood happy-hour playdate….You brought your kids. You brought some food. And you brought your poison…One neighbor specialized in gimlets, another in craft beers, and yet another in cult bargain wines….There was the secret smoker’s club, a group of people who perched on the perimeter, furtively sharing a single cigarette, ready to stamp it out if a kid approached. And then there was the secret pot club, a group of recreational stoners who had more vigilant security procedures. They would collectively disappear entirely, smoke in shifts, and return to the party. I once observed a mother/lookout stopping curious kids from finding the pot smoker’s circle in a side yard by intercepting the kids with a platter of cheese and crackers. Paranoia makes perfect. –“Vice is Nice,” Hugh Garvey, Cookie

Charles Bronson on Mandom

From April 1911.

One of the boys, Omar, tells how he was beaten, tortured, and interrogated for hours that day, with the soldiers asking about the guerrillas. “They asked for Ramiro, but I didn’t say anything. It went on for about five hours. They stepped on my bare feet with their boots and boxed my ears with their open palms. They said that if I told anyone about it they would kill me,” says Omar. He was able to escape later that night…. Alejandro, in his late 20s, also ran into the mountains that first day where he hid with other villagers for four days without eating. “How can one trust such a government,” he asks. “Here you live in fear. You see a soldier and run to the hills.” He tells how he returned to his house to find his few possessions and clothes all on the floor, dirty and broken. “Imagine if the government arrived to support agricultural production instead of repressing,” he says. “But… the criminals are part of the government itself. What is happening is that the government is forcing the poor to take other measures, even though they don’t want to.” –“The Hidden Side of Mexico’s Drug War,” John Gibler, Z Magazine

For Roth, in his fiction, sex is an act both of supreme self-assertion and rebellion–of rebellion against bourgeois convention, against death itself. Sex simultaneously offers a release from and heightening of the self, a way to the truth. His lead men invariably seek to find a woman who is their equal in appetite in what Iago called “preposterous desires.” This ideal woman is often subliterate or anti-intellectual, an immigrant such as the Croat Drenka Balich, from Sabbath’s Theatre, on whose grave men would return long after her death to masturbate in memory of her astounding sexual capacities. She is the young Cuban beauty Consuela Castillo, a “masterpiece of volupté” who has an affair with the aged libertine David Kepesh in the affecting The Dying Animal. And, in The Humbling, she is Pegeen Stapleford, a full-figured, 40-year-old lesbian who begins an affair with Axler in defiance of her sexuality and her parents, old friends of the actor… It is Pegeen who introduces the dildos and whips into her sex life with Axler; he, in turn, introduces her to the penis. “It fills you up,” she says, “the way dildos and fingers don’t. It’s alive. It’s a living thing.” –“The Humbling, by Philip Roth,” Jason Cowley, New Statesman

Estimates of the Arab growth rate, both within Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, vary widely. A maximalist school holds that the Palestinian population on both sides of the 1949 armistice lines is expanding far more rapidly than the Jewish sector and will surpass it in less than a decade. Countering this claim, a minimalist school insists that the Arab birthrate in Israel is declining and that the population of the territories, because of emigration, is also shrinking…. Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal… In the absence of a realistic two-state paradigm, international pressure will grow to transform Israel into a binational state. This would spell the end of the Zionist project. Confronted with the lawlessness and violence endemic to other one-state situations in the Middle East such as Lebanon and Iraq, multitudes of Israeli Jews will emigrate.–“Seven Existential Threats,” Michael B. Oren, Commentary

From January 1852.

Enter, from stage right, Agamemnon, a man in his mid-forties. He walks from stage right towards stage left in a straight line that runs through the doorway. As he passes through the frame, he trips on the block and falls over. –“Agamemnon—a play in two acts,” Tom McCarthy, Everyday Genius (via)

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, baboons aren’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that bipedal hominids in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, in great gambolling gangs, babies riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around on rocks and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha! But neither baboons nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this big bloke leaning against a rock, picking his fingernails, a hairy geezer sitting in the sun with his shirt off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run up trees, hang on for grim life. They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his tribe. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot. –“AA Gill reviews The Luxe,” AA Gill, Times Online

Does it seem odd that so many top sports stars are born at the same time of year? Almost certainly not, because Malcolm Gladwell already covered this in Outliers earlier this year and it wasn’t interesting then, as it was just a spin on educational year cohorts that most people already know. But here’s the twist: a study by Captain Nemo from the Nautilus Institute shows that 99.9% of all readers won’t remember where they read it first, so we can claim this factoid as our own. Many people fear Islamic terrorists. In fact you are more likely to die of boredom reading this book than in a suicide bombing. Still, there’s an infallible way to spot a suicide bomber: just check out everyone with a Muslim name who has no life insurance. Or now that our secret is out, find every Muslim who has changed his name to Jeremy and bought life insurance. Why didn’t the CIA think of this? –“Digested Read: Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner,” John Crace, The Guardian

From March 1881.

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline. Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves. –“The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal,” Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine

The most valuable position—the “first”—is the one in the upper left corner of the grid. This position is usually reserved for a person’s “best” friend, significant other, or a close family member. While few object to a significant other’s appearing first, some teens, especially girls, get jealous when other same-sex peers are listed above them on the page of the person they believe to be their closest friend. Exceptions are made for family members and it is common in some teen circles to list family first. While some teens list family to avoid conflict with friends, others do so because they see a family member as their closest friend. This is exemplified by Laura, a white 17-year-old with Native American roots from suburban Washington state, who says: “My sister is in position number one because she is one of my best friends and she will be there for me most likely longer than anyone else.” Although most teens find a way to manage the Top Friends feature, others prefer to avoid it altogether. Some intentionally leave the site’s founder in the first position while others find more creative solutions. One teen explained that she changed her Top Friends every month, creating themes such as “all Sagittarius Friends.” After getting frustrated with the resultant social drama, Amy, a half-black/half-white 16-year-old from Seattle, found code that allowed her to not display her Top Friends on her profile so that no one could see them and, thus, no one could be upset with her. While Amy’s approach is uncommon, it highlights the power of this feature in shaping how teens interact with the site. –“Friendship,” danah boyd, in Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media (via)

You might have guessed by now that my father was not an affectionate man. He never cuddled with me or my brothers. I tried to force him to show affection, and was told that I made a pest of myself. When he was home, I remained near, pulling attention-gaining pranks as frequently as I dared. Nothing sparked his fatherly warmth. In fact, my annoying behavior encouraged him to start carrying his signature cane. As time passed, he began caning me and my brothers for the slightest infraction. –“My Father, the Terrorist: A son of Osama bin Laden paints an intimate portrait of the man who would become the world’s most infamous terrorist,” Omar bin Laden, Vanity Fair

From November 1895.

The euphemisms for madness in the American vernacular–”nervous breakdown,” “cracked up,” “lost his marbles”–all connote a process in which the mind breaks away from the commonsense world where the normal live and takes up residence in a country without logic, a little mental Madagascar, where change comes on suddenly and without warning, where the laws of linearity and orderliness no longer apply. The madman sees things that aren’t there. The madman chitters in a language only he can understand. The images of mental illness that pervade American popular culture–often portrayed as generally embarrassing brands of craziness–reinforce the idea: bipolars vacillate between manic rage and closed-curtain depression (Mommie Dearest); schizophrenics slavishly obey their inner voices (A Beautiful Mind); obsessive-compulsives repeat the same hand-washing ritual until their skin turns cracked and flaky (As Good As it Gets). Scroll the higher-numbered cable channels after ten P.M. and chances are you’ll come across a movie involving Multiple Personality Disorder (now termed Dissociative Identity Disorder)–a villain who is his own victim, his own evil side transmogrified into another self, the me that is not me. Even postmodern theorists Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson use schizophrenia as a metaphor for the schism between the images that constitute contemporary culture and the meanings those images, or signs, represent. However, the real-life schizophrenic who lunged at my wife showed me that these metaphors can have it backward. Madness may be less a fracturing than a concentration: a fixation on one thing that becomes the head of the pin upon which the entire universe must balance. The one thing becomes the Everlasting Thing: a crushing, overwhelming weight that, when it fails, results not in an explosion but in an implosion which leaves behind a black hole that draws to itself all light, hope, peace, and all difference. Madness is the overwhelming persistence of sameness; it is the absence of change. –“Hydrophobia,” David McGlynn, The Missouri Review

History classes in Polish schools have always had a whiff of politics. Since people were unable to learn about politics within the official state structures during the Polish People’s Republic (PPR), they studied history on their own. This pursuit of history reflected a dream of independence, and historical narrative was used to map a route toward the nation’s political renaissance. The years of Soviet occupation were also times of official historical indoctrination. It was perfectly clear for the Soviet authorities that history exerted great symbolic force in creating a political space, and they did not hesitate to exploit it. The authorities never missed a chance to stress the allegedly everlasting conflicts with the Germans, the pre-Christian roots of Polish statehood, and all kinds of people’s resistance to the nobility and European monarchs. At the same time, Soviet-approved history magnified the common fate of Polish and Soviet armies during the Second World War, which eventually led to a rupture in historical continuity and established a new order. It was these falsifications that Solidarity fought against. The righteous anger at these historical forgeries was one of the driving moral forces behind the changes. As Václav Havel wrote, “A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The [post-totalitarian] system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society. Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.” –“The Whereabouts of the Imprisoned Polish Memory,” Wojciech Przybylski, Eurozine

When Eli Lilly applied for FDA approval for using HGH to treat kids with “idiopathic short stature,” meaning at or below the 1.2 percentile on the growth chart, the widespread assumption among doctors was that short stature is a psychological disability and that adding inches increases psychological well-being. Indeed, the company strove mightily to produce data showing that short children who used HGH had a measurable improvement in their psychological “quality of life.” The thing is, Eli came up empty. A consensus document approved last year by the pediatric-endocrinology community acknowledges that there’s no evidence that growth hormone enhances quality of life in short but medically normal kids. One European study compared adults who had used HGH as short children against others who were similarly short in childhood but hadn’t used the drug. They ended up essentially the same psychologically in adulthood—except that, oddly, the HGH users were less likely to have romantic partners than nonusers.–“The Science of Shortness,” Stephen S. Hall, New York

From September 1964.

When democracy is established after the break-up of a multi-ethnic state a rash of secessionist movements normally follows. The reason is simple. For communities that fear being permanent minorities in the new democracy, separatism may seem the only way to avoid forever being underdogs. The safest way of protecting themselves is by having their own state; but the divisive process of separation is risky and costly. It fuels the growth of identity politics, in which people find themselves bearers of a univocal identity that is decided by others– rarely an auspicious development. This is what happened in interwar Europe, where the new democratic states all had significant national minorities. With the growth of fascism and Nazism these minorities came under attack from regimes that were virulently anti-democratic; but the division of people into mutually exclusive groups had already taken place. Sadly, it seems that the spread of democracy and ethnic cleansing go together. Keane tries to explain the ethnic strife of interwar Europe by citing economic conditions, along with the anti-democratic tendencies of leading intellectuals such as H.G. Wells and the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran. No doubt these factors played a part, but the pattern is too widespread to be accounted for in these circumstantial terms. Similar conflicts have been played out in post-communist Yugoslavia, parts of the former Soviet Union and countries in postcolonial Africa. Keane cites India as having proved “not only that democracy could survive violence and carnage: it proved that democracy could thrive within a society that lacked a homogeneous demos, a civil society shackled by poverty and illiteracy and crowded with all sorts of cultural, religious and historical distortions.” The Indian achievement is certainly extraordinary. Yet it cannot be forgotten that it has occurred against the background of partition. In India as elsewhere, democracy and the exclusionary politics of nationalism have been closely linked. –“The Democratic Wish” (review of The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane), John Gray, The National

For many of us George Tiller was mentor, teacher, friend—he was known in our circles as ‘St. George’ because he embodied principles of goodness, kindness, respect, and faith–the best in us. He was a man of extraordinary principles and generosity. In a field in which courage and dedication in the face of hatred, violence, and terror are almost expected, Dr. Tiller stood out. He had been firebombed more than once, mercilessly harassed by legal officials who over and over came up with nothing, and survived a previous assassination attempt in which he was shot. He continued to do his work because women needed him. So we are justifiably protective of Dr. Tiller’s reputation and honor. NBC concocted a dreadful hybrid that bears no resemblance to this truly amazing doctor. And they concocted a story that bears no resemblance to the complexity of the issues involved in abortion, let alone late abortion. NBC cannot hide behind the words, “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event when they begin their story by having a doctor murdered in his church. Their disclaimer should have read, “This story purports to be balanced but we are about to insinuate that a doctor who was assassinated was, himself, guilty of homicide, and thus to blame for his own murder.” This is particularly egregious because Dr. Tiller was the repeated victim of politically motivated investigation and was repeatedly found innocent of any wrongdoing related to his medical practice. This “fiction” casts doubt on his integrity, and gives the impression that abortion is homicide which U.S. law is clear that it is not. –“Dr. George Tiller Murdered Again: Abortion Providers Angry at Law & Order episode,” (Press Release), Abortion Care Network (via)

Jessica Mann, an award-winning author who reviews crime fiction for the Literary Review, has said that an increasing proportion of the books she is sent to review feature male perpetrators and female victims in situations of “sadistic misogyny”. “Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive,” she said. “Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me,” said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female crime writers. –“Sexist Violence Sickens Crime Critic: Leading novelist says graphic depictions of sadistic misogyny have become so extreme she refuses to review any more fiction,” Amelia Hill, The Guardian (via)

From December 1970.

If you’re like me, you’ll agree there’s nothing so dispiriting as finding yourself in the lavishly appointed dining room of a luxury resort, flute of Prosecco in hand, about to embark on a nine-course tasting menu—when, from somewhere up on the ceiling, in wafts the opening verse of “Lady in Red.” Maybe I’m oversensitive, but it felt like a dentist’s drill aimed squarely at my skull. I loathed Chris de Burgh’s 1986 original; going cheek-to-cheek with this florid instrumental version was infinitely worse. From that point on the meal became an afterthought, while the god-awful sound track consumed all my attention. An orchestral arrangement of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” came and gave without mercy. Mantovani’s rendition of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” only made me wish I were. They say music has the perceived effect of slowing down time. In this case it made time grind to an agonizing halt. –“Bad Music in Public Spaces,” Peter Jon Lindberg, Travel and Leisure

Our age is dominated by Saturn, and it is time to rediscover Jupiter. It is safe to say that few if any of the millions who have read C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia would have summarized their message in those terms, taken from medieval planetary lore. Michael Ward, who with Planet Narnia has established himself not only as the foremost living Lewis scholar, but also as a brilliant writer in his own right, well knows that in advancing such an argument he risks being lumped with Dan Brown and other so-called discoverers of hidden codes. But his cumulative case for reading the Narnia books in terms of the planets… is overwhelming…. Ward proposes, instead, that the books reflect and embody the thematic characteristics accorded in the medieval world-view to the seven planets, ie including the Sun and the Moon but excluding Uranus, Neptune and the now demoted Pluto. Thus The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe embodies Jupiter, Lewis’s favourite planet… This explains, and gives coherence to, the otherwise puzzling jumble of themes and characters (including Father Christmas) that Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien so disliked. Prince Caspian, with its military theme and imagery, embodies Mars. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, journeying towards an ever- larger Sun and discovering its aurifying influence, Ward regards as the “most obvious” novel to interpret under his scheme. Luna is seen to fine effect in The Silver Chair, and perhaps with more subtlety than Ward has yet explored; so too Mercury in The Horse and his Boy; Venus, initially surprisingly but with increasing conviction, in The Magician’s Nephew; and, climactically, Saturn, the planet of old age, despair and death, in The Last Battle. –“Welcome to the real Narnia: The hidden medieval message at the heart of C.S. Lewis’s classic Chronicles,” Tom Wright, Times Literary Supplement

In the game’s scenario, 20 million armed American “patriots” begin seizing local and federal government offices. These are the same people whose earlier Tea Party protests had been ignored and dismissed by the mainstream media. Now, they post bounties for government employees. There’s fighting in every state. Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs has been disappeared, and Glenn Beck has been found dead of an “aspirin overdose.” Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly have been rounded up, and Fox News forcibly shut down. The US military refuses to come to Obama’s rescue. His loyalist forces of 40,000 end up controlling merely three counties in Virginia, while an allied force is in charge of three counties near Washington, DC. The Federal Reserve also controls two of its own counties, as does the Cong (the remnants of the Democratic Congress). A collection of pro-Obama black nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists have a hold on two counties. What can you do as a player? You can join the patriots trying to capture Obama and defeat the Cong. –“The Obama Coup,” David Corn, Mother Jones

From Harper’s Magazine, November 1964:

Hofstadter on the “Paranoid Style”

From “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter, from the November 1964 Harper’s Magazine.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Read the rest of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” for free…

From April 1855.

From the Web

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper’s Magazine of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day. I was not always a fan. When I first read it two decades ago, I thought Hofstadter was being needlessly insulting by equating political views with mental illness—despite his insistence that he wasn’t using the word that way. Besides, I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy’s day was long over, and even in the age of high Reaganism, I thought, the type of person Hofstadter described was merely handing out flyers on street corners…. How times have changed! Hofstadter’s beloved liberal consensus has been in the grave for decades now. Today it would appear that his mistake was underestimating the seductive power of the paranoid style. –“From John Birchers to Birthers,” Thomas Frank, The Wall Street Journal

An international network led by Latin American drug cartels and the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah has chosen West Africa, among the poorest and most corrupted corners of the world, as the nexus for illegal trade in cocaine, oil, counterfeit medicines, pirated music and human trafficking. International law enforcement officials say the profits fuel terrorist activities worldwide. The past three years have seen a staggering increase in drug trafficking in particular, making West Africa— and especially the countries of Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea— the premier narcotics region of Africa. The consequences are most visible in Guinea-Bissau, which saw the double assassination of its president and army chief on the same day in early March and more recently the murder of two leading politicians in the struggle for succession. –“Full Frame: Africa’s new narcostate,” Marco Vernaschi, GlobalPost

The national money shamans have danced around the carcass of our dead horse economy, chanted the recovery chant and burned fiat currency like Indian sage, enshrouding the carcass in the sacred smoke of burning cash. And indeed, they have managed to prop up the carcass to appear life-like from a distance, if you squint through the smoke just right. But it still stinks here from the inside. Clearly at some point we must find a new horse to ride, and sure as god made little green apples one is broaching the horizon. And it looks exactly like the old horse. –“Raising up Dead Horses,” Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus

From July 1968.

The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short of a trillion (that is, one thousand billion) pounds, close to two-thirds of the annual output of the entire economy. To paraphrase a great wartime leader, never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform. –“Watch: King says banks should be split up,” Mervyn King (quoted by Chris Barnyard), Liberal Conspiracy

In theory, the purpose of building “sunset” provisions into these new powers was to allow–indeed, to force–Congress to consider what changes might be needed in the event of such misuse. Given the incredible secrecy of intelligence investigations, this would be a dubious check even under ideal circumstances. But what’s truly astonishing is that even known abuses don’t seem to have given legislators second thoughts about resisting administration demands. –“‘War on Terror’ II,” Julian Sanchez, The Nation

You know the problem of consciousness is a hot topic right now. There have been half a dozen books published just in the last year or two. All of them are trying to figure out what it is in the brain that makes you self-aware. Of course, materialists like Moravec, and Churchland and his wife, are of the opinion that is it only going to be a short time until we figure out how the brain makes itself aware. But there is another school of philosophy that is coming into prominence now, with which I am sympathetic. They’re called the Mysterians. The Mysterians, and this includes a number of very top notch philosophers like David Chalmers, Colin McGinn, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and a bunch of others, are of the opinion, and I share this view, that consciousness is something so mysterious that no one has the slightest idea how the brain makes itself aware, and we may never find out. That’s the extreme Mysterian position, that we don’t have the intellectual capacity ever to solve the problem of consciousness. It may be something beyond our power to understand; the way calculus is beyond the mind of a chimpanzee. It’s an interesting point of view because it may be that there are some questions beyond the reach of science because of the limitations of our present brain. Perhaps in a million years from now, if we evolve with bigger brains, we’ll solve it. Roger Penrose is a Mysterian. This was one of the themes of his famous book The Emperor’s New Mind, for which I wrote the introduction. We Mysterians think consciousness won’t be understood for at least a long, long time. Also, the Mysterians believe that self-awareness and free will are two names for the same thing. If you try to imagine yourself without self-awareness, then you can’t imagine yourself having free will to make decisions. You’d be like an automaton. –“This Side of the Pond: The Martin Gardner interview,” Don Albers (interviewer), Cambridge University Press

From November 1895.

McPherson was born in 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. Later, as he writes in “Going Up To Atlanta,” he worked at odd jobs to help support his mother, brother, and sisters while attending a Catholic school where all the nuns were white and the children black, then the public schools, “where all the mean people went.” As a boy he loved comic books but soon discovered the Colored Branch of the Carnegie Public Library, where he learned that words without pictures “gave up their secret meanings, spoke of other worlds, made me know that pain was a part of other people’s lives.” All the while, surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends of his father’s, he was struggling with the enigmatic figure of his father. McPherson senior had become the first black master electrician in the state, but only after the racist suppression of his repeated applications to get a license had caused him “irrevocable pain” and led to a drinking problem and a period in jail. At the time, McPherson did not understand the forces that had broken his father. “I had…been working every kind of job to help support the family I thought he had abandoned,” McPherson writes. “During all my years in Savannah, I had never had peace or comfort or any chance to rely on anyone else. I blamed him for it. I was very bitter towards him.”–“About James Alan McPherson,” Dewitt Henry, Ploughshares

This first is from Tim Tebow’s press conference a week ago in which he addressed the concussion he sustained against Kentucky.

Testimony: “I think it was very humbling because you know at any moment it can be over.”

Pertinent Scripture: Phillippians 2:8-9

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to death-

even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

and gave him the name that is above every name

–“Tim Tebow Messiah Watch: Transfiguration Edition,” Deadspin

Let us pray. Almighty God, today we pray imprecatory prayers from Psalm 109 against the enemies of religious liberty, including Barry Lynn and Mikey Weinstein, who issued press releases this week attacking me personally. God, do not remain silent, for wicked men surround us and tell lies about us. We bless them, but they curse us. Therefore find them guilty, not me. Let their days be few, and replace them with Godly people. Plunder their fields, and seize their assets. Cut off their descendants, and remember their sins, in Jesus’ name. Amen. –“Fundamentalist ‘Fatwah’ issued against lives of Mikey Weinstein and Rev. Barry Lynn,” Military Religious Freedom

From November 1964.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report– somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine– “contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006].” Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple. –“Did Feminism Make Women Miserable? Why a recent study on declining female happiness really stinks,” Barbara Ehrenreich, Salon.com

Slater, who has a nice line in droll asides (”Dickens can never keep wooden legs out of his writing for long”), rarely offers a judgment, but insights abound: noting the triumphant arrival of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, he writes that if Pickwick were “to metamorphose into a Dickens version of Don Quixote, he would need a Sancho Panzo to ground him in reality”. He takes us compellingly through all the great shocks of Dickens’s life– the blacking factory; first love; second love; the railway accident– but he doesn’t dwell on them, nor does he speculate on the psychological aspects of his relationship with his father and mother or with Nelly. Nor does he mention magic, Dickens’s life-long obsession. All this can be found elsewhere. –“Charles Dickens by Michael Slater: Simon Callow welcomes an incomparable portrait of an awesome writer,” Simon Callow, The Guardian

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings. The trend will not bring back the corner grocery stores and the declining organizations—bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, and such—cited by Putnam and others as the traditional glue of American communities. Nor will our car-oriented suburbs replicate the close neighborhood feel so celebrated by romantic urbanists like the late Jane Jacobs. Instead, we’re evolving in ways congruent with a postindustrial society. It will not spell the demise of Wal-Mart or Costco, but will express itself in scores of alternative institutions, such as thriving local weekly newspapers, a niche that has withstood the shift to the Internet far better than big-city dailies. –“There’s No Place Like Home: Fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That’s good news for families, communities… and even the environment,” Joel Kotkin, Newsweek

From November 1964.

Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment. Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention.–“A New Metaphor for Reading,” Alan Lie, The New York Times

A 45-year-old policeman was hacked to death with a machete while he was swimming with his wife near his home in Preah Vihear province’s Kampong Pronak commune. The attacker approached the policeman in a boat, and after committing the crime, docked and hired a motorbike taxi, travelling to the police station to confess. In his confession, the man said that he attacked the victim because of an incident several years ago in which the victim threatened to kill him with witchcraft.–“Cop Chopped for Witchcraft Threat,” Ramsey Kampuchea, The Phnom Penh Post

In March 2009 New York-based GfK Custom Research and British “place branding” consultant Simon Anholt released the global Nation Brands Index (NBI). It rates countries based on international perception of various categories, including tourism, investment, and immigration and governance. Germany ranked 1st overall, the UK 3rd, Canada 4th, the US 7th and China 28th. Iran placed 50th and Israel failed to make the top 50. While it’s tempting to dismiss nation branding as an example of the PR industry’s cynical commodification of the world, its assumptions can shed some light on Israel’s self-inflicted inability to re-brand.–“The Israeli Brand,” Craig Smith, Adbusters

Patti Smith sings “You Light Up My Life”

From January 1958.

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to “musical taste” itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances. “From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.” –“100 Years of Big Content Fearing Technology—in its own words,” Nate Anderson, Ars Technica

In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn’t take long and isn’t lingered over, the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt. The survivors wander around an empty city, usually London, regretting the lost world of restaurants and symphony orchestras. There’s an elegaic tone, so much that was so good has passed away. Nobody ever regrets football matches or carnivals. Then they begin to rebuild civilization along better, more scientific lines. Cosy catastrophes are very formulaic—unlike the vast majority of science fiction. You could quite easily write a program for generating one. –“Who Reads Cosy Catastrophes?” by Jo Walton, Tor.com

The specific aim of the Polymath Project was to find an elementary proof of a special case of the density Hales–Jewett theorem (DHJ), which is a central result of combinatorics, the branch of mathematics that studies discrete structures (see ‘Multidimensional noughts and crosses’). This theorem was already known to be true, but for mathematicians, proofs are more than guarantees of truth: they are valued for their explanatory power, and a new proof of a theorem can provide crucial insights. There were two reasons to want a new proof of the DHJ theorem. First, it is one of a cluster of important related results, and although almost all the others have multiple proofs, DHJ had just one — a long and complicated proof that relied on heavy mathematical machinery. An elementary proof — one that starts from first principles instead of relying on advanced techniques — would require many new ideas. Second, DHJ implies another famous theorem, called Szemerédi’s theorem, novel proofs of which have led to several breakthroughs over the past decade, so there is reason to expect that the same would happen with a new proof of the DHJ theorem. –“Massively Collaborative Mathematics,” Timothy Gowers & Michael Nielsen, Nature

From April 1968.

La Forge: “Captain, the tech is overteching.”

Picard: “Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge.”

La Forge: “No, Captain. Captain, I’ve tried to tech the tech, and it won’t work.”

Picard: “Well, then we’re doomed.”

–“Ron Moore calls Star Trek’s tech ‘meaningless’,” Sci Fi Wire (via)

James Ellroy’s brand of extreme writing is fun to read. At its best, it could be addictive. The stories are told in a uniform, crazed, modern American vernacular, and with such breakneck speed, hairpin plot turns, compression, and telescoping of events that the reader needs to stop and rest from time to time. The standard noir subject matter of killings, beatings, and acts of revenge is all here, but the incidents are so closely packed and described with such loving attention to the injuries suffered that it’s hard not to feel that some limit of what the reader can bear is being toyed with:

He shot them in the back at point-blank range. Small-bore exit wounds —the cleanup wouldn’t be that big a deal….

Fulo smashed their teeth to powder. Pete burned their fingerprints off on a hotplate.

Fulo dug the spent rounds out of the wall and flushed them down the toilet. Pete quick-scorched the floor stains—spectrograph tests would read negative.

Fulo pulled down the living-room drapes and wrapped them around the bodies. The exit wounds had congealed—no blood seeped through.

–“Fever Dreams of Your FBI,” Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books

Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn’t about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There’s a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men. –“What’s Really Going on With All These Vampires?” by Stephen Marche, Esquire

From November 1897.

What if a guy nobody’s ever heard of, from Hawaii no less, with a Muslim African father and a Muslim Indonesian stepfather and a mom from Kansas named Stanley inexplicably glides from Punahou to a short sheep-dip at Occidental to the Frankfurt School’s favorite Ivy League haunt, Columbia, to Harvard Law? What if he’s such an arrogant, aloof suckup of no particular ability or accomplishment that his fellow students openly ridicule him with the invention of the “Obamamometer,” which measures epic brown-nosing on a scale from one to ten? What if he’s blissfully unaware of his own deficiencies, and instead comes to believe that he’s earned everything that’s come his way — or ever will?….What if his opponent for president is a creaky, cranky, cantankerous old fart who hates his own party and then — I know this bit is unbelievable but we’re still spit-balling here — out of the blue selects some dizzy moose-hunting dame from… Alaska!… to be his running mate? And what if she electrifies his doomed candidacy (heck, even he doesn’t really seem to want to win) and sends him vaulting into the lead in the polls? What if he’s on the verge of actually defeating BO2 when Barry’s media pals lay down some serious covering fire and then, mysteriously, the booming U.S. economy collapses almost overnight as George Soros strokes a white cat and chuckles menacingly? –“What If…,” David Kahane, The Corner

I’ve been to Prague and saw with my own two eyes and what can I tell you? A miniature Budapest. Can I say it like it is? It’s no big deal. It was a bonus trip from the plant. So why not? A freebee. But I wasn’t impressed. A buncha churches. But I’m no church goer, so what was I supposed to do with all them churches? A side like in Buda, a side like in Pest, and between them a small imitation of a Danube, but so small, it brought tears to my eyes, I got so homesick! And them bridges! The Charles Bridge, lordee lord! An antique with nothin’ modern about it. Nothin’! Back home we’d give it to the panhandler at the Ecseri. You put it next to the Elizabeth Bridge and you wouldn’t believe your eyes! And if that weren’t bad enough, for three days you couldn’t get a decent plate of goulash anywhere, just slices of roll drenched in all sorts of sauce with a side of cabbage. And that’s what they call food! Enough is enough, guys, let’s head for home! But what really got my goat was the uvaga, uvaga, everywhere uvaga, blah-blah-blah, and you’re supposed to know what they’re talkin’ about! Which is something I’ll never understand. Why can’t they speak proper HUNGARIAN and say, this here is a chair, this a table, and this here’s a mug of beer, lordee lord! ‘Cause, sure, the Germans speak German and the French speak French and not Hungarian, which is bad enough, but there ain’t a lot we can do about that. But speakin’ CZECH? What an idea! –“What are the Czechs like?” by Zsolt Csalog, Eurozine

There are many reasons why the record of accomplishment for space diplomacy is so modest, at least compared to nuclear accords. Reducing nuclear dangers comes at the very top of every presidential “to do” list. In contrast, space-related issues usually have to wait far back in line. Nuclear weapons are also distinctive. Because they have very narrow purposes, it is somewhat easier to place boundaries around negotiations, unlike “space weapons,” which can encompass many multipurpose technologies used for other essential military and nonmilitary purposes. Another reason why space diplomacy has been moribund is because the negotiating forum where such talks are supposed to occur—the 65-nation Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament operates by consensus and has been tied up in knots for more than a decade….President Obama appears intent to reinvigorate space diplomacy after eight years in which former President George W. Bush’s administration rejected any initiative that might constrain the U.S. military’s freedom of action in space. The Obama administration will be more proactive diplomatically, but familiar impediments to success remain in play: nuclear-related issues will demand the president’s attention, his “to do” list is daunting, “space weapons” remain hard to define, and overreaching can doom prospects for success. –“A Rare Opportunity for Space Diplomacy,” Michael Krepon, Global Security

From December 1862.

In recent days, both Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have suggested that the H1N1 flu vaccine may be unsafe and questioned the Obama administration’s recommendation that Americans get vaccinated, with Limbaugh asserting that “[y]ou’ll be healthier” if you don’t believe what the government says and Beck suggesting that the vaccine may be “deadly.” However, health experts have repeatedly stated that the vaccine is a safe and necessary tool to combat the virus, and that, in CDC chief Thomas Frieden’s words, “This flu vaccine is made as flu vaccine is made each year, by the same companies, in the same production facilities, with the same procedures, with the same safety safeguards” and “[t]hat enables us to have a high degree of confidence in the safety of the vaccine.” –“Beck, Limbaugh Fomenting Fear About H1N1 Vaccine,” Media Matters

Last month, [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)] editor-in-chief Randy Schekman wrote to academy member Lynn Margulis, a cell biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asking for “a satisfactory explanation for [her] apparent selective communication of reviews” for a paper she ushered through the peer-review process. Schekman made the demand after a report in Scientific American cited Margulis as saying that she obtained “6 or 7″ reviews before netting “2 or 3″ favourable ones that recommended publication. The paper in question, by Donald Williamson, a retired zoologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, claims that the transition of caterpillars into butterflies can be explained by ancient butterflies inadvertently mating with velvet worms . This controversial idea is supported by Margulis, who is a strong proponent of the hypothesis that new species form by symbiotic mergers between unrelated organisms. She denies any wrongdoing and stands by the work. But Williamson’s claims met with scepticism from many scientists after the paper was published online. “If you know the literature on insect metamorphosis and insect development, you would know right away that this is absolutely ridiculous,” says Fred Nijhout, an insect developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. –“Row at US Journal Widens,” Elie Dolgin, Nature News

In terms of evolutionary history, I do not think that reciprocal altruism, inclusive fitness (kin selection), or group selection in its various forms can account for empathy-induced altruistic motivation in humans. Rather, generalized parental nurturance now seems the most likely evolutionary basis of empathic concern—even for strangers. Human parental nurturance is far more flexible and future-oriented than the parental instincts found in most—perhaps all—other mammalian species. It is need-oriented, emotion-based, and goal-directed. And it can be generalized well beyond our own children—in the case of pets, even to members of other species. If parental nurturance is the prototype for empathy-induced altruism, then the intensity of tender, empathic feeling for strangers should vary with perceived similarity to progeny, not perceived similarity to self. Is this true? –“Empathic Concern and Altruism in Humans,” Dan Batson, On the Human (via)

From August 1963.

At first glance, the Study Area presented as a junkyard, but one in which people were living. Tents of various vintage were observed. In addition, the following materials had been used to construct dwellings within the Study Area: Plyboard. Blue plastic tarp material. Tree limbs. Lengths of string, wire, and rope. Large wooden cable spools. Shopping carts. Construction pallets. A piece of inverted signage reading: lt. governor bustamante, working for families. Rocks, bags of dirt, and an office chair had been used to secure a tin roof. The yard of one house boasted a number of well-tended houseplants, including several cacti. This house also had a white metal screen door neatly mounted into its frame and an American flag flying above it on a tilted pole. At a nearby house, dozens of branches from an artificial Christmas tree had been inserted at regular intervals into the siding, decoratively….Based on a pre-Study survey of existing media information, the Principle Researcher (PR) had expected the tent city to be populated by middle-class individuals recently made homeless by the economic downturn, beaten but not destroyed, a kindly Steinbeckian gathering of stoic types, possibly playing guitars, who would welcome the PR, gratified that someone had come to document their plight. The PR left the Study Area and drove around Fresno for several hours, seeking a more Steinbeckian tent city. Although promising pockets of poverty were observed, no Steinbeckian tent city was found.–“Tent City, U.S.A.,” George Saunders, GQ

The unfolding generational pattern in Star Wars would predict that the full story will begin with the youth of Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi and end with the coming to maturity of the as yet unborn child. Star Wars offers itself as a tessera, a deliberate fragment designed to lead us on. Conjecture about the whole may be unnecessary; Time magazine tells us that the sequence will look something like this:

I
II	Fall of the republic and the rise of the empire
III
IV	A New Hope	}
V	The Empire Strikes Back		Skywalker
VI	Revenge of the Jedi
VII
VIII	Rebuilding of the republic
IX

–“Star Wars and the Productions of Time,” David Wyatt, The Virginia Quarterly Review (1982)

Will Obama’s administration end up as a remake of Jimmy Carter’s? Carter started out with his own take on the “audacity of hope”: let’s lose our “inordinate fear of communism.” Toward the end of his term—the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan—he recanted. “That action had made a more dramatic change” in his view of their true goals “than anything they have done in the previous time I have been in office.” Two hundred and fifty days into his first term, it is now reasonably clear that Mr. Obama is heading in the same direction—if he continues to walk the road paved with good intentions. The man who knows better than most how to calculate and corral power at home, who beat the mighty Hillary machine and snipped away John McCain, does not seem to appreciate the game nations play. In that game, nice guys don’t win. –“The Age of Nice, or Politics as Psychiatry,” Josef Joffe, Commentary