from June 1890

Trailer for the film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, by Tamra Davis, screening on PBS’ Independent Lens on April 16. See John Berger’s essay on Basquiat in the April 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine, out now.

From June 1947

By the time I come aboard in late September, Tara has been drifting for one year. The sun makes a complete revolution around us each day, while slowly spiraling downward. The crew has been using the ship’s bulletin board to keep time, posting the sun table and the weekly weather forecasts, conjecturing how far the ship will drift in the coming week. On October 4 the sun sinks below the horizon, and a season of perpetual twilight begins. The transition is like walking around with your eyes half closed. You get sleepier and sleepier; your eyelids drop another millimeter each day. Then one day they don’t open at all. We remove the sun table and replace it with a table that indicates the time of the full moon’s rising and setting. We wait with much anticipation for the moon to be continuously overhead, because it has become our daylight. –“A Hole to See The Ocean Through,” Ellie Ga, Triple Canopy

Since then, I’ve grown to hate these listeners. Oh, I hate them, hate them, hate them. Every time one of their narrow-minded, classist letters makes it on the air, I contemplate burning my tote bag in protest. The problem, for me, isn’t just that some people don’t like some things NPR covers. It’s that these reflexively snobby pseudo-intellectuals see NPR as their own—a refuge from the mad world outside, a “safe,” high-minded palace that should never be sullied by anything more outré than James Taylor (whom, of course, they love). Not only do these letter-writers perpetuate the worst caricature of public radio, but their views don’t track with what you actually hear on the air. Over the years, public radio fans have heard Terry Gross interview Gene Simmons and Ira Glass confess his love for Howard Stern.

If these snoots love public radio as much as I do, then one of us must be missing the boat about what public radio is supposed to be about. Is it me, or them?

It’s them. –“‘We Listen to NPR Precisely To Avoid This Sort of Stupidity’” Farhad Manjoo, Slate

Teodorin’s 68-year-old father, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, seized power in a 1979 coup and has made apparent his intent to hand over power to a chosen successor. Obiang has sired an unknown number of children with multiple women, but 41-year-old Teodorin is his clear favorite and is being groomed to take over. That’s a scary prospect both for the long-suffering citizens of his country and for U.S. foreign policy. As a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with Teodorin put it to me, “He’s an unstable, reckless idiot.” –“Teodorin’s World,” Ken Silverstein, Foreign Policy

From June 1890

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby-Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov: I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so. –“Reader’s Block,” Geoff Dyer, FSG Work In Progress

Then last August, the Vatican introduced a change in canon law that will apparently make it impossible for Catholics to defect. Flynn, O’Sullivan and Dunbar have thus suspended their service. But the Web site continues to be a clearinghouse for information on the church in Ireland and its abuses, and it has helped start a debate on Irish identity — on the possibility of separating the two parts of the term “Irish Catholic.”

Certainly many Irish people find the idea of abandoning Catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity. A televised panel discussion on the abuse crisis last summer ended with a reporter asking a woman who was voicing her anger if she was ready to leave the Catholic Church. She paused, as if befuddled, then said, “Where would I go?” –“The Irish Affliction,” Russell Shorto, The New York Times

In Life! Camera Action, Reina, a student at New York Film Academy, has been disowned by her parents for defying their wishes that she do something befitting a respectable middle-class girl. “America is a free nation,” Reina counters, “and so am I!” Luckily, Reina has passion, which, according to her professor, is what matters most: “All successful people, in any industry, Bill Gates, Anil Kapoor—you know him, right? Played the host in Slumdog Millionaire. Or Danny Boyle, director, Slumdog Millionaire, very successful.” But since neither passion nor parents pay the bills, Reina has to work two jobs (Indian video store, Indian restaurant) and continues to do so even with the deadline for her unplanned thesis film a week off. Given such long odds, muses the professor, “Satyajit Ray is going to come out of his grave to help you, right?” (Unfortunately, Ray was cremated.) –“Far From Bollywood: The New Indian Cinema in Exile,” Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, The New York Observer

Another policewoman points out the entrance to Pavilion B, housing the Shining Path inmates. I’m signed in a third time, and am being escorted up a staircase when a figure darts forward. Trout-brown eyes, long dark hair parted in the middle, and a muslin scarf draped over her shoulders, embroidered with small flowers. Her face is thinner, more striking than in photographs. She wears loose black trousers and blue high-heeled shoes.

“Maritza?”

She nods, smiles.

Instinctively, I embrace her. –“The Dancer and the Terrorist,” Nicholas Shakespeare, Intelligent Life

There is further misdirection in the invitation to see Ferris’s evasiveness as an achievement. Ferris has mastered a technology newly emergent in the 1980s: the combination of computers, telephones, and digital audio sampling. We see answering machines that Ferris has rigged to play false messages; we see his stereo amplifying digital samples of his coughs and snores to create the illusion that he’s at home in bed. The director Hughes has cleverly divined what this new technology will come to be used for; it is for not being there. A few years after the movie, one imagines, Ferris will start a company that designs phone trees and voicemail systems; he will be a millionaire by 1990. The frustration, the sense of having been hoaxed, that is felt by the dean of students when he realizes that he isn’t really listening to Ferris through the intercom of the Bueller family home but only to a recording of Ferris, delivered to the intercom by a computer—you felt the same frustration yesterday when you dialed your health insurer and were led into a maze of cheerful, obtuse recorded voices that by design denied you an opportunity to say what had made you angry enough to call. –“Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited,” Caleb Crain, the Paris Review

Because we’re both writers, a lot of our sex has been textual. That’s why it baffled me, a couple of years into this, when I realized that my email server had an automatic but seemingly very arbitrary spam filter that trapped certain messages with the kinds of dirty words that tend to appear in those random sex-oriented messages we all receive on occasion. I had no idea I had a spam filter. I get plenty of spam, and as you can see, my correspondence is hardly pristine. –“‘Le Rire de la Meduse’—an excerpt from The Correspondence Artist,” by Barbara Browning, Fanzine

There’s a peculiar comfort in imagining the companionship of great composers, for it is among them that a child prodigy is at home. Mozart rules the hopeful parent: homeschooled, composing harpsichord minuets at the age of five, playing the Viennese court at six, visiting Johann Christian Bach in London at age eight. He was one of the earliest celebrated child performers, and like Barbara, he was born to the profession—his father was a violin master. Then again, in some arts, there is almost an inevitability to the appearance of prodigies. Pablo Picasso’s charming Bullfight and Pigeons—drawn in 1890, when he was nine years old—can still elicit admiration at exhibitions and wise nodding. Ah, even then his talent shone through. –“Vanishing Act,” Paul Collins, Lapham’s Quarterly

Beyond the policy debates and legislative post-mortems of the DREAM Act defeat, one key issue has been lost regarding Obama and the Democrats’ high-profile failure here. With nothing to show for his high-pain, no reward strategy, President Obama has much to account for, having ordered a catastrophic mass deportation policy large enough to clear out the City of San Jose, California. The incalculable human toll on America’s families, employers, and communities by deporting 800,000 immigrants is breathtaking. Families are broken, employers are scrambling to find critical workers, and entire neighborhoods and towns are desolate. The Administration’s iron-fisted strategy to find support for humanitarian immigration reform brings to mind the old Vietnam war dictum, “To save the town, it became necessary to destroy it.” To obtain a just solution for America’s undocumented immigrant community, the Obama Administration has found it necessary to assail, deplete, and strike fear into its heart. –“To Save the Town, It Became Necessary to Destroy It: Obama’s Politically Inept ‘Deportation First’ Immigration Policy and Epic Failure on DREAM Act,” Daniel Shanfield, Daniel Shanfield, Esq. Immigration Law & Defense Blog

Even a “little bad” can be a little admirable, as I discovered while researching the life of Frank Sinatra, when I saw violence momentarily mingle with kindness. One day when Sinatra stopped by his first wife’s house to attend his young daughter’s birthday party, he arrived just as a rambunctious youngster toppled an antique vase from the mantel. Mrs. Sinatra screamed as her precious porcelain shattered to smithereens, and the youngster burst into tears, afraid she was going to be punished. Sinatra walked over and patted her head. “Don’t you worry about it, sweetheart,” he said. Striding to the mantel, he picked up the matching vase and smashed it to the floor. “There,” he said, wiping his hands. “Now let’s get some cake and ice cream.” –“Unauthorized, But Not Untrue,” Kitty Kelley, The American Scholar

From December 1851

That’s important for later: the simplicity and brevity of Werther is what made it ripe for mass consumption, which also made it ripe for parody. People could read it fast, and it could be printed fast. Unofficial –- since there wasn’t such a thing as “official” –- Werther merchandise filled the cultural landscape. Tailors sold outfits that let men look like Werther, the Edward Cullen of the story. Guys began carrying around Werther pistols. Napoleon wrote fan-fiction. At least one woman committed suicide with a copy of it in her pocket. This international obsession was referred to as “Werther-Fieber,” (Werther Fever), which is too close to “Bieber Fever” for anyone’s comfort. And many people still use the phrase “Werther effect” for copycat suicides by fans of popular movies or books. Why am I telling you this? Because it’s ridiculous. It was the Twilight of its day. And cynical people back then knew it. –“The Sorrows Of Young Werther and The Rise of Parody,” by Mike Drucker, Splitsider

Some of the best recent empirical work in political science has shown that most Americans attempt to vote in accordance with their economic interests, rather than by the dictates of ephemeral antagonisms over God, gays, or guns. Unfortunately, economic 
improvements for the vast majority of Americans over the past three decades have been so marginal that they are easily overshadowed by cynical manipulations of the political business cycle, the timing of economic expansions with election years, and by the strange fact that lower-income voters are more sensitive, in terms of voting behavior, to income growth among the wealthy than they are to their own economic well-being. –“Speak, money,” by Roger D. Hodge, Harper’s Magazine

I left the New Museum’s “The Last Newspaper”—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway. I can’t remember when they were last begrimed that way, and don’t know whether that is more reflective of the fact that newspapers today use higher-quality inks, or that I tend to read the news online more often than on paper, or that I no longer ride the subway to work. –“Disappearing Ink,” by Luc Sante, NYRBlog

From September, 1912

I once asked an old, tired-looking black man to play James P. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues” and he obliged after first turning around to take a better look at me. That tune was written in New York in 1920s and recorded a couple of times by Johnson himself and a few others. Its name already sets up a scene in one’s imagination. Someone has woken late, drawn open the curtains and found the rooftops and streets covered with snow. It must be a Sunday, because the tune evokes the melancholy and the quiet joy of someone lounging around, reminiscing about the night before. That mixture of emotions is the quality of all the best pop and jazz tunes. If they were only sad, or only happy, they would grow tiresome after a while. Was it Al Capone who expressed the opinion that jazz was better than opera, because it didn’t just go around slobbering? –“Reminiscing About the Night Before,” by Charles Simic, NYRblog

I spotted a worn copy of The Female Eunuch on my mother’s shelf in 1999, and something about the savage cover, showing a hollow female torso with handles hanging from a clothes-rail, seemed to whisper a wealth of dangerous secrets. Like a grimoire in a fairytale, I felt drawn to the book, somehow compelled by it. Leafing through the yellowing pages I realised, with the righteous rage that only a preteen can summon, that I had been lied to. There were other ways of looking at the world. There was more to sex than the sterile, ritualised commercial play my classmates were already rehearsing, more to femininity than the smiling servitude that made my mother and grandmother so unhappy. In later life, I would come to understand this process as consciousness-raising; at the time, it felt like a striplight had been switched on in my mind. –“The Female Eunuch 40 years on,” by Laurie Penny, the Guardian

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free. –“I pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice,” by Arundhati Roy, The Times of India

From September 1912

The three-power occupation of Iran, which began in 1941 and did not end until the Russians finally left in 1940, took the form of zoning. It therefore tended to reduce communications, not to improve them as they were improved in Egypt or Syria. Thus the provinces retained their ancient isolation, and the peasant his ignorance of anything beyond his immediate surroundings and his daily needs. Moreover, allied preoccupation with the long, thin lifeline to Russia caused impoundings of transport and a dislocation of supplies which rendered the foreigner unwelcome and unpopular. So did a tremendous upset of prices and an inflation which, over the five-year period, enabled a few merchants and landowners to enrich themselves beyond their prewar dreams, while the public servant and the vast majority of the peasants found themselves hungrier and poorer than before. No one likes being elbowed aside while his country is occupied. World War II, therefore, increased the Iranian’s long-standing dislike of self-interested foreigners. It also on the whole increased the scandalous disparity between the few Iranian rich and the many Iranian poor. –“Lessons from Iran,” Elizabeth Monroe, Virginia Quarterly Review (first published in 1952)

During my last semester in graduate school, I made a lot of unexpected friends. I’d meet them in the card room above the OTB on 72nd and Broadway, or I’d meet them over Recession Specials at the Gray’s across the street, or I’d meet them in the poker pit at the Tropicana, or I’d sit next to them on the 5 a.m. bus from Atlantic City, trying not to think about what it meant that these were the only sunrises we saw anymore—the washed-out sun peeking out over the white, industrial cylinders of north New Jersey. My friends and I never really talked about anything. Mostly, we muttered about the bad beats we’d taken, each new friend a companion in losing. Sometimes, they would talk about the tits on some female dealer and we’d all smile in recognition. Once, an old Saudi man who sat to my left in a 5-5 No Limit Hold ‘em Game at the New York Players Club told me that he missed the openness of the Middle East. When I started to laugh, he said he was talking about the flatness of the earth and the architecture, not the people. –“The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High,” Jay Caspian Kang, The Morning News

Creationists have been fixated for decades on Richard Dawkins’s “Weasel” simulation from his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986). Unlike real genetic algorithms developed for industry or research, Dawkins’s Weasel algorithm included a very precise description of the intended target. However, this precise specification was used only for a tutorial demonstration of the power of cumulative selection rather than for generation of true novelty. In the Dawkins example, the known target is the phrase from Hamlet, “Methinks it is like a weasel.” The organisms are initially random strings of twenty-eight characters each. Every generation is tested, and the string that is closest to the target Weasel phrase is selected to seed the subsequent generation. The exact Shakespearean quote is obtained in just a few dozen generations. Despite Dawkins’s explicit disclaimer that, in real life, evolution has no long-distance target, creationists of all varieties have latched on to “Weasel” as a convenient straw version of evolution that is easy to poke holes in. –“War of the Weasels,” Dave Thomas, Skeptical Inquirer

From September 1912

Bradley Manning, still effectively a boy, had few friends, and his family had all but fallen apart. In a time before Facebook and sustained long-distance friendships, he was leaving his two best friends for what could easily have been the last time (for Shanée Watson, it was). He didn’t need to tell them he was gay in order to confess a hidden affection, to explain a behavior or even to allow his friends to know him better–in a short time he would be gone. And yet, presumably for no other reason than that he was who he was and wanted to live honestly in his own skin, he felt compelled, in a conservative, religious town, to confide in his friends that he was a homosexual. Not only must it have taken tremendous courage for such a young man, it displays a crucial aspect of Brad’s personality. As his Facebook profile still says today, “Take me for who I am, or face the consequences!” –“Private Manning and the Making of Wikileaks,” Denver Nicks, This Land Press

The first thing you need to know: I don’t like breaking stories or the pressure that accompanies it. Sweating out those last few minutes before the moment of truth. Hoping you’re right even though you’re thinking, “I know I’m right. I have to be right. This is right. (Pause.) Am I right?” Wondering deep down, “I hope my source isn’t betraying me,” then rehashing every interaction you’ve ever had with that person. My stomach just isn’t built for it. If I had Marc Stein’s job, I’d be chain-smoking Lucky Strikes like Don Draper. At the same time, I know a few Guys Who Know Things at this point. Whenever I stumble into relevant information — it doesn’t happen that often — my first goal is always to assimilate that material into my column (as long as it’s not time-sensitive). Sometimes I redirect the information to an ESPN colleague. Sometimes I keep it in my back pocket and wait for more details. It’s a delicate balance. I have never totally figured out what to do. –“The case of the accidental tweeter,” Bill Simmons, ESPN, The Magazine

If missing women are silenced women, Hamilton has made it her mission to be fully present and accounted for. An aboriginal, transsexual sex worker from one of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, she’s a kind of activist polyglot, able to speak with whatever voice best suits the situation. She presents as insistently at ease, adding “dear” and “honey” to her sentences like dollops of crème fraîche. Still, mention her name, and journalists, politicos, and armchair commentators turtle in their heads with alternating fear and exasperation: she’s infamous for her public and embarrassing arguments with anyone who crosses her. (Even one of her fiercest supporters told me, “You’d be safer writing a profile of a Mafia don.”) –“The Unrepentant Whore,” Michael Harris, The Walrus

From September 1912

Teaching often facilitates a relationship with one’s own ignorance: only by confronting the limits of my knowledge can I begin to ask questions, begin to imagine how questions will be asked of me. This is a confrontation I have learned to accept readily, as a useful practice, a gentle intellectual and spiritual stretching in the safe and narrowed context of a classroom. But outside the door of the San Quentin classroom is a prison yard, and beyond that, stairways that lead to cellblocks and dorms where thousands of men live literally stacked against each other. I do not understand how to live out there. I don’t have to. But more significantly, I don’t know how to think about what a life there means. For some hours after teaching—sometimes days—I can’t reconcile the scale of my daily existence with the scale of a world which has brought about this other place. —”On Irving Goffman,” Kathryn Crim, Threepenny Review

In a lot of ways, Sonic Youth are anti-Albinis: proud capitalists and Capital-A artists, seeking that ever-elusive label combination of effective distribution, honest accounting, creative control, and cool coworkers. The fact that Sonic Youth almost got all of those things on their own terms is amazing in its own way. Yet the band’s side of the story is more interesting for the light it casts on the contingent nature of “indie” as a cultural category that artists themselves, despite how they’re portrayed, can choose to completely ignore. We could place these belief systems on a spectrum, with Albini on one end representing the dyed-in-the-wool ideologue, and Sonic Youth, well, tracing a strange path that predicted a lot about how smaller bands and labels operate today. —”Bad Moon Rising: The Practical Lessons of Sonic Youth,” Eric Harvey, Pitchfork

More than anything, Hegarty wants the world to strive towards a more matriarchal existence. “Just living is creative,” he explains. “Every decision we make in life is a creative one: sentences we string together, the way we get dressed in the morning. Every movement could be considered dance if you really open your mind to that feminine plane of thought.” “Wow!” says Abramovic. These two artists do seem awestruck by each other, listening intently to what the other has to say, only speaking when they’ve reached their full conclusion. One thing, however, remains unspoken: the ultimate tribute, Abramovic´’s request that Hegarty will sing at her funeral, which she recently divulged to her biographer. “This is Marina’s wish,” confirms her assistant, after the interview. “But she has never asked Antony because she is too shy.” —”When Antony Met Marina,” Eleanor Morgan, The Guardian

From January 1913

Gladwell, who has built a wildly successful career curating and synthesizing other people’s research for the common reader’s consumption, has been surprisingly remiss in examining the social web’s impact on various forms of activism. In a recent New Yorker article, in fact, he declared that “the revolution will not be tweeted” — that social media are practically useless when it comes to serious activism. While I don’t question his remarkable intelligence or unique talent — I fully subscribe to the work of psychologist Howard Gardner, whose latest book, Five Minds for the Future, demonstrates the value of the kind of synthesizer mind Gladwell possesses — I find it incongruous for a man who has abstained from participation in social media to weigh in on their value for civic action. (Gladwell has a page on Facebook but not a profile. He exists on the site much as Van Gogh does: you can’t “friend” him but you can “like” him.) –“Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong,” Maria Popova, Change Observer

Every November, all five of The Dobbs Group’s show-jumping horses must be transported from their summer stables in Vermont to their winter stables in Wellington, Florida. The workers are transported to the tropics too, returning to New England with the horses in April. They ride in trucks each way alongside their expensive equestrian charges, tending to the horses’ needs throughout the thirty-two-hour journey. Their return to Vermont marks the start of a new annual circuit of horse shows—an exhausting schedule during the spring, summer and fall months that entails constant travel between their Vermont base and horse shows around the country. At these shows, it is not unusual for the grooms who care for Dobbs’s horses to rise in the middle of the night or in the predawn hours to clean, brush and prepare the horses for a training session or early morning competition. For years, undocumented immigrants from Mexico have been relied upon to meet these labor demands. –“Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite,” Isabel Macdonald, The Nation

It turned out that what had floored me most about Nosferatu was not only what you’d expect—yes, the filmmakers had apparently rummaged around in their psychic basements to turn Max Schreck, who played the vampire, into something conversation-stopping in its sinister and dignified repulsiveness—but also one of the movie’s more startling implications: that the pure at heart were as much on the vampire’s wavelength as those already given over to perdition. The vampire’s satanic assistant and the virtuous heroine were both sensitized, across continents, to Nosferatu’s approach. Over and over again, the heroine and the vampire seemed to be reaching out to one another. And Nosferatu not only infected the world with his strangeness as he moved through it, but the world he invaded seemed to make him more and more oddly ordinary. Sure, he disembarked from a rat-infested ship in Bremen. But then there he was, trooping along the street, the only one around to lug his coffin, balanced on his hip, all the way to his lair. –“Jim Shepard,” Jim Shepard, Ploughshares

From May 1890

Because I am a Jew, and a New York Jew at that, and because I am furthermore employed in publishing, I am, as is well known, bound by tradition and perhaps even natural law to sign a book deal. And so I have. It’s a rather pleasant thing to do, entering into a writing contract, despite the mental labor required to produce a book (I grow weary even now as I think of it). I do, however, work for a monthly magazine at which several colleagues have either written a book, are currently writing one, or are mulling the idea of it. I am therefore expected to behave as though securing a publishing deal is a good, but not overly momentous, event. In this regard I have undoubtedly failed to uphold the standards of my industry. I talk incessantly of my project, to all and anyone foolish enough to listen. And my literary self-commendation is not limited to work fellows: My girlfriend hears much of my project, as does my 4-year-old boy, my ex-wife, both of our divorce attorneys, my neighbor, my college friends, the folks who only hear from me via social media, my cheesemonger, close and distant relatives, and yes, my dog, Frankie. –“Mistaken Identity,” Theodore Ross, Tablet

Such is the sacredness of our relationship with our bowels that we’re all programmed to pretend no one ever poops (or writes about it), despite the fact that every day on this planet, we humans produce 1.5 billion pounds of the stuff. The plain truth is, we all poop. Even athletes. Especially athletes. One of the sports world’s last unspoken dirty little secrets is that this perfectly normal bodily function has a profound effect on all levels of competition. And the more you understand the way exercise impacts the intestinal tract, the more you’ll wonder how any athlete ever manages to hold it in. In fact, a lot of times, they don’t. A survey by the Oklahoma Foundation for Digestive Research, released in 2000, found that 72 percent of conditioned athletes have suffered from lower-intestine distress. –“It Happens,” David Fleming, ESPN, The Magazine

Albert Speer was relaxed during our interview and had no qualms about revisiting his lurid past. He could talk about those years for hours in that fluent, Franconian-accented English of his. He learned it from his American and British military guards in Berlin’s Spandau prison where he was incarcerated for war crimes until 1966. He was lucky not to have been hanged with Ribbentrop and the others. “Why do you agree to meet foreign journalists like me, and patiently answer our endless questions?” I asked him. “It is my duty,” he replied. –“The Master Architect,” Peter Foges, Lapham’s Quarterly

Beat it, Chinese

From December 1912

To read The Kreutzer Sonata after one has read the diaries of both Sophia and Leo Tolstoy is to realize two things simultaneously: one, the story line (except for the murder) is very nearly a transcript of daily life inside the Tolstoy marriage; two, the marriage itself is something that Dostoevsky more easily than Tolstoy might have written. In Tolstoy’s writing we have characters who, at once in thrall to both inner limitation and the force of circumstance, are placed on a landscape of world-and-self that steadily widens and deepens. In Dostoevsky we have these same characters living so completely inside their own heads that the world narrows down to the claustrophobic and the surreal. The Tolstoys, in the flesh, could not live out the “Tolstoy” within themselves. Equipped with all the external privilege necessary to live an open, expansive life, they were nonetheless driven to live as though Dostoevsky was making them up. The “happily ever after” of marriage had done them in. –“The Ancient Dream,” Vivian Gornick, Boston Review

What we have in the place of collaboration is the shattering loneliness of Juárez. In the 1990s, when young women began to disappear from the poorest shantytowns in the city, and then turned up like so much waste matter, bruised, raped, mutilated, and dead, police officers laughed in the faces of the distraught parents who appealed to them for help. Reporting on the story, I stood one afternoon on a gray hill covered in gray dust above a gray squatter settlement and looked across the river at the faux-adobe office buildings of El Paso. Around me the tumbleweed jittered in the breeze, and plastic supermarket bags and odds and ends of clothing fluttered everywhere, as if all the trash in all of Mexico had beached itself at this spot. A few hundred yards downhill lived the sister of one of the disappeared girls, and for all the outreach by NGOs and solidarity groups concerned with the murders, she seemed as isolated and vulnerable as it was possible for a young woman to be. –“The Murderers of Mexico,” Alma Guillermoprieto, The New York Review of Books

You’ve been traveling all over the world for decades. How is it that you have no sense of direction?

that’s a great question — one that i frequently ask myself. i think i was born with the gift of being directionally challenged. my instinct is pretty much always to go the way that is opposite of the way i should be going. and this has served me extremely well professionally. when you get lost — when you, essentially, always go the opposite direction from the way you should — all kinds of marvelous and illuminating adventures ensue.

Such as?

one of my most magical experiences of this kind occurred in cairo. i set out to explore the city by walking, as i do every city i visit. i was headed, i thought, for a particular neighborhood that had a number of touristy attractions, but apparently i kept making the wrong turn, because as i walked, i went ever deeper and deeper into a maze of ever narrower and narrower streets. i saw all kinds of everyday, working-class shops and houses i probably wouldn’t have seen on my planned excursion. eventually i ended up walking down an alley lined with down-and-out people looking covetously at my watch. the alley got so narrow that i was literally stepping over their legs in some places. clearly i was lost and i thought that i was headed for big trouble. but then, just when i was beginning to get desperate, a young boy materialized and wordlessly took my hand. he turned me around and walked me out of the maze and into ever broader and broader streets, until he deposited me in a main square. i looked around and realized that i recognized where i was. then i turned back to thank him. in that instant, he had melted away into the crowd. –“Q&A: Don George—On Getting Lost (and Staying Lost)” interview by Matt Gross, The Minor Glories

From July 1947

Gaitskill’s compassionate analysis of sexual urges that could be lazily labeled “extreme” or “subversive” is most explicit in her recent collection, Don’t Cry (2009), which often invokes suffering and its alleviation through reflection rather than dialogue and action. In “Folksong,” the narrator reads a news item about a woman who has sex with 1,000 men in a row in hopes of breaking a world record. The narrator then imagines the complexity behind this woman’s attempt to turn herself into a “fucking machine.” Unlike Millet, whose sole concern would seem to be a graphic representation of her couplings, Gaitskill describes the marathon sex almost solely through the music playing, “a hammering dance music” that is “like a high-speed purgatory where the body is disintegrated and reanimated over and over again until the soul is a whipsawed blur. It is fun!” –“The Vertical Altar,” Hannah Tenant-Moore, N+1

Until now, we have had no trial for Communism, though real Communism killed or mutilated more victims than Nazism and Fascism combined. Communism’s trial has never taken place, outside the intellectual sphere, for two reasons. First, Communism enjoys a kind of ideological immunity because it claims to be on the side of progress. Second, Communists remain in power in Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Havana. And in areas where they’ve lost power—as in the former Soviet Union—the Communists arranged their own immunity by converting themselves into social democrats, businessmen, or nationalist leaders. –“Communism’s Nuremberg,” Guy Sorman, City Journal

The radicalism of the executive prerogative asserted in this case is breathtaking, yet such is the state of American justice. According to our laws, the search of an American’s home requires a search warrant issued by a judge, but our present chief magistrate claims the power to execute summarily a citizen who has not been shown to be directly engaged in violent activity or combat. Apparently, this is what Obama means by pragmatism: that laws may be suspended at will in the name of convenience. We shall simply murder our ideological adversaries and then brag about it in the press, blithely assuming that such crimes will silence the chorus of enemies. What all-important tactical aim will the extrajudicial murder of this disloyal American citizen achieve? His sermons are already widely available; his incitements would live on after him, endowed with a made-in-America aura of martyrdom. If anything, Awlaki’s assassination would constitute a proof of his argument. –“Obama’s Tyranny,” Roger Hodge,” Daily Beast

From December 1912

President Obama, according to many Republican politicians and media personalities, is not only the most liberal President in American history, he is a mortal threat to the American way of life. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently described Obama as “the most radical President in American history,” and right-wing entrepreneur Dinesh D’Souza describes him as “the most anti-business President in a generation, perhaps in American history.” Over the course of his administration, the President has been alternately accused of being a Socialist, a secret Muslim, an atheist, a foreigner—and now a Kenyan anti-colonialist. Oddly enough, Obama has largely maintained his composure in the face of this orgy of defamation. –“The Myth of Obama’s Radicalism,” Roger Hodge, New York Daily News

Most Americans are fed up with the overheated hectoring of the political class. Glenn Beck’s posturing deserves to be challenged. And, sure, it’s possible to find examples of excess on both ends of the political spectrum. I’ve written against the “End of America” or “descent into fascism” thesis presented by folks like Naomi Wolf, and I strongly oppose 9/11 conspiracy theorists (although they are as likely to be right-leaning libertarians as leftists). Moreover, I didn’t like it when lefties carried signs comparing Dick Cheney or George W. Bush to Hitler; I think it reflected a lazy and unhelpful analysis. (On a side note, I’m currently in a debate at Dissent in which my interlocutors have invoked Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini in describing elements of the Latin American Left. I don’t think it has been particularly helpful in that instance either!) –“Jon Stewart’s False ‘Moderation’,” Mark Engler, Dissent

In the United States, placentas are typically treated as medical waste. Some hospitals hold them for a couple of days, but most throw them out immediately, which struck me as a reasonable thing to do with a used sack of blood. Then I began to read about people around the world who believe these organs contain powerful, protective, and sometimes dangerous spirits. That we throw such organs in the garbage along with hypodermic needles, cheek swabs, and tongue depressors was starting to seem sad and lame. After all, placentas have been eaten; buried; burned; marched in parades; sung to; dressed in clothing; entombed in pyramids (of their own!); floated down rivers; stolen; sold; used to curse, bless, cure, and beautify; been talked to; not talked in front of; taken on trips; given gifts of pens and needles; taken to school; fed; stabbed; used to make art prints; turned into teddy bears; tied to the heads of children; and probably a host of other things too strange or mundane to record. –“The Afterlife of Afterbirth: Notes on eating human placenta,” Cynthia Mitchell, Meatpaper

From January 1907

There’s no doubt that in Somalia, crime pays—it’s about the only industry that does. There is even a functioning pirate stock exchange in Xarardheere, where locals buy “shares” in seventy-two individual pirate “companies” and get a respectable return if the company is successful. Most of the money, though, is frittered away. Boyah, who personally has made hundreds of thou- sands of dollars if not millions, asked me for cigarettes when I met him. When I asked what happened to all his cash, he explained: “When someone who never had money suddenly gets money, it just goes.” He also said that because of the extended network of relatives and clansmen, “it’s not like three people split a million bucks. It’s more like three hundred.” –“The Pirates are Winning!” Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Review of Books

All is true. In vast, impoverished cities like Bombay, Cairo, Jakarta, Rio, or Lagos, the plot lines of the nineteenth century proliferate. Not ignorant mass suffering, but the ordeal of sentient individuals who are daily exposed to a world of possibilities through a sheet of glass—satellite TV, the Internet—that keeps them out. The extreme conditions of megacity slums contain the extravagant material that animated Dickens. In the gap between what their inhabitants know and feel and what they can have lies all the poignancy of Hardy. –“Dickens in Lagos,” George Packer, Lapham’s Quarterly

Some terms are spectacularly creative and useful. “Ham sandwich!” is a “Holy crap!”-like exclamation that would fit well in the absurd world of Anchorman. We all probably know an “askhole”—the kind of person who asks a lot idiotic questions. A “Harlot Davidson” isn’t a female biker, but a woman in a long-distance relationship who blabs about that relationship at a party and then hooks up with another dude anyway. Then there’s “fubarose”—a mix of F-word-derived slang and chemistry jargon used by chem majors to mean an “impure carbohydrate mixture, an undesired product of sugar synthesis.” Though “fubarose” has a science-specific meaning, I wonder if the inventors of this word have accidentally found the building block of everything in the universe. If we’re all made of fubarose, that would explain a few things. –“Do you speak college slang,” Mark Peters, Good

From May 1890

I make a medium-sized chunk of my less-than-medium-sized income writing about books in print publications. So it’s pretty annoying when some guy corners me in a hallway at a party while I’m trying to get my crunk on (often the case), sticks a sweaty thumb on my nose—nail nubbed to bone—and tells me that the book review is dead, no one cares anymore, we are the citizenry of ADD-America with no interest in the written word, and, in fact, no tolerance for texts longer than 350 words. Usually this speech is followed by my interrogator—who is himself a book reviewer—blubbering in a corner unabashedly, dripping blood, sweat, and dainty intellectual tears, and attempting to bite his toenails. –“Who Says the Book Review is Dead?” Adam Wilson, Black Book

There is nothing inherently American, or even Anglo-phone, about acronyms. Chinese itself has them, despite its remarkable character-based writing system. Many words consist of more than one character, and Chinese acronyms will use one character from each word (often, but not always, the first one). But of course acronyms are more suited to alphabets. The fish became a Christian symbol largely because the Greek word for it, ichthos, is an acronym for iesous christos theou ouios soter, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”. The Jews enjoyed making acronyms too, and even the name of the Bible is the tanakh, an acronym for torah nevi’im ketuvim, “Torah, prophets, writings”, the three main sections of the Hebrew Bible. The proliferation of acronyms through texting seems particularly Anglophone. The standard term for a text in America is itself a set of capitals (SMS, short message service). Now other languages are following suit. In German, the initialism SMS has become an acronym proper, pronounced “zims”. It has also been made into a verb, smsen, so that it’s perfectly natural to say Ich habe ihr gesmst, “I texted her.” –“OMG, ETC,” Robert Lane Greene, More Intelligent Life

Science history, with the charm of a fairy-tale legend, records some of the high points and iconic details of that saga. Young Miss Goodall had no scientific credentials when she began, not even an undergraduate degree. She was a bright, motivated secretarial school graduate from England who had always loved animals and dreamed of studying them in Africa. She came from a family of strong women, little money, and absent men. During the early weeks at Gombe she struggled, groping for a methodology, losing time to a fever that was probably malaria, hiking many miles in the forested mountains, and glimpsing few chimpanzees, until an elderly male with grizzled chin whiskers extended to her a tentative, startling gesture of trust. She named the old chimp David Greybeard. Thanks partly to him, she made three observations that rattled the comfortable wisdoms of physical anthropology: meat eating by chimps (who had been presumed vegetarian), tool use by chimps (in the form of plant stems probed into termite mounds), and toolmaking (stripping leaves from stems), supposedly a unique trait of human premeditation. Each of those discoveries further narrowed the perceived gap of intelligence and culture between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. –“Fifty Years at Gombe,” David Quammen, National Geographic

From April 1918

Who is it this time? The biggest celebrity of all, Barack Obama. Following in the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt’s Hero Tales from American History, and Jimmy Carter’s The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, the president has come up with Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, a set of 13 “inspirational tales” of American pioneers.

Frankly, just the title makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears and scream. Even though it is taken from My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, it reeks of patronising, pseudo-didactic, blood-freezing smarm. And that’s not mentioning the subtitle—honestly, what children’s book has a subtitle? –“Leave the prose to the pros, Mr. Obama,” Philip Womack, Telegraph

More than 2 million Americans served in Vietnam. Ohio lost 3,094 of them. The rest of our boys came home, but the ship never righted. Guys I’d known my entire life weren’t fun, or funny, anymore. No more teasing, no big brother reprimands to get out of the street and quit picking on the little ones. Sometimes I’d look at my friends’ older brothers sitting on their front porches and their stares would scare me. I’d look in their eyes and get goose bumps. It was as if they thought I was trying to start a fight just by smiling at them. I’d scamper off, full of questions my father warned me never to ask. –“What it was like,” Connie Schultz, Columbia Journalism Review

The festival committee was wise to bring [DBC Pierre] out, Melbourne loves that shit. To some degree the crowd fitted to his style perfectly. Melbourne is the hipster capital of Australia, and the audience was made up of equal quantities of irony and fixed gear bicycles, I’m guessing, his people. After DBC swam off stage in a drunken whoosh, the audience clapped the precise number of times they heard his name mentioned during the festival, (seventeen thousand). In a way he was lucky. If the event was held during the day, he’d have been crucified by the crazy English literature teachers who swarmed the festival, demanding to know everyone’s process, while refusing to hand back the microphone once their question was asked. –“Tales from the Melbourne Writers Festival,” Brad Dunn, The Outlet

From May 1890

Do you date men or women or both? Both. Is dating men and women different? Normally with women you have to play all kinds of little games. You have to make vegetarian sushi even if you’re not a vegetarian. And we all have to be sensitive. It’s a long project. Whereas with men, it’s much easier to seduce them. Just yesterday I wrote a really naughty email to a spiritual master. And I met him in a course, I was listening to his talk but I didn’t stay for the ritual afterward because I knew I would stay to impress him, to try to have sex with him at some point. And I’m like, I don’t want to do that. So I just sent him a really straight email, asking him, “Do you want to meet for a sex date?” And he didn’t answer yet. But I felt really naughty and inappropriate, approaching this spiritual person in this way — he’s like a tantra-shaman-person. I felt like I don’t want to play any games — I want to have sex. But I don’t want to take his course; I don’t want to take his workshop; I don’t want to book him for a private session; I don’t want to say I’m interested in his work. I want to say, “You’re hot and I want to have sex with you.” And that’s what I wrote to him. And he can say yes or he can say no. –“Talking To Strangers,” Nerve

In the early 19th century, Jane Austen, who did not use the phrase ‘point of view’, or read an anthology called Points of View, nonetheless began writing novels whose sophisticated and innovative use of limited narration is founded on a firm grasp of the fact that ‘everything said is said by [i.e. from the limited perspective of] an observer’: an insight described by McGurl as the ‘foundational constructivist claim [of] contemporary systems theory’, and the cornerstone of ‘the paradoxes of narrative “point of view” in the Jamesian tradition’. Although James’s prefaces do describe, in possibly unrivalled detail, a writer’s struggle to find the right narrative perspective for a given story, writers had been conscious of this struggle for a long time. It was with great difficulty that Dostoevsky abandoned an early draft of Crime and Punishment, written in the first person from Raskolnikov’s perspective, and decided to shift to third-person narration by a ‘sort of invisible and omniscient being, who doesn’t leave his hero for a moment’.” –“Get A Real Degree,” Elif Batuman, London Review of Books

Clinton’s willful conflation of insurgency and drug trafficking arises from one of two possible sources—ignorance or malicious misinformation. An insurgency seeks to take over territory to bring about a profound change in the structure of society and, usually, take over the government. Drug traffickers, despite Calderón’s statements to the contrary, do not launch offensives against the state to replace the government. They’re all about protecting and expanding their very lucrative business. In part, the seemingly purposeful misunderstanding of this distinction is at the root of the failed drug war policy. –“Plan Colombia for Mexico,” Laura Carlsen, Counterpunch

From September 1906

Here, Todd leans across my desk and thrusts his face into mine. “Open your eyes,” he says. “What do you see, Coates?”

I see blue eyes of startling clarity and nearly unlined skin that doesn’t show a single dilated pore. Somehow, Todd has found the secret of eternal youth. The formula is fourteen gallons of Pepsi-Cola a week, heavy use of Black & Mild cigarillos, and hatred of all living creatures. –“The Landlord,” Wells Tower, The New Yorker

Catherine M. and Ms. Surrender owe their fame to our cultural lust for juicy “true stories” in any form. The Sexual Life was hailed as “the most sexually explicit book ever written by a woman,” while Bentley was praised for “bravely” venturing into “what has been considered male territory.” If it is indeed brave for a woman to admit to enjoying anal sex—something one in three women has reported experiencing before the age of 24—then we do need frank nonfiction to widen the cultural conversation about sexuality. But form is inseparable from meaning. Through their writing, Bentley and Millet unconsciously reveal not the truth of sexual liberation, but the false conceit of their narrators: ordinary masochists masquerading as unprecedented libertines. –“The Vertical Altar,” Hannah Tennant-Moore, N1BR

So what happened? How did we end up living in this all-bets-are-off world where sockless Brooklyn hipsters with Edwardian moustaches make artisanal pickles while, across the bridge, desperate office chicks believe they have no social currency unless they own 398 handbags and 268 pairs of shoes, the heels of which are so high that they would previously have been worn only by a woman who was lying on her back wearing nothing but the pumps in question and a ball-gag? –“Welcome to the Fashion Apocalypse,” Simon Doonan, Slate