November 2009
11 posts
“If you look anything like the fellow in the picture, you can stop reading now....”
– from a 1961 ad in Life for the Hat Corporation of America, 530 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY
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1968's My Lai massacre photos (part exposé, part...
The front page of Friday’s edition of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer included a story headlined “Photographer destroyed photos of soldiers in the act of killing.” Before I type even one sentence more, I want to make clear that I have never ever done anything brave enough to make me believe I am better than Ron Haeberle, the Army combat photographer in that headline.
Decency really...
"An Iranian Tijuana? So What?" (my new Global... →
An excerpt:
If we’re going to accept that Astara is Iran’s Tijuana, then I think we need to ask ourselves how much a foreigner could learn about the U.S. by visiting Tijuana and documenting the gringo debauchery. Maybe not much. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot.
I’m reminded of a roadtrip in 1994. We’d just crossed from Utah to Nevada when we pulled up to a casino in the town of...
Vladimir Nabokov reading at 92nd Street Y (March... →
I went looking for audio of Monday night’s 92Y Nabokov event and instead came across this from 1964. A delight for me. Pure delight.
Nabokov himself is reading from one of my favorite books ever, Pale Fire. The reading includes the narrator’s jaunty defense of his decision to install two ping-pong tables in his basement. And this:
His laconic suggestion that I “try the...
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Malcolm Gladwell and the case for endless...
I piled cringe upon cringe Friday — first because I read Steven Pinker’s vivisection of Malcolm Gladwell’s new essay collection, second because of what I found when I Googled a flub Pinker wielded against Gladwell.
Reviewing What The Dog Saw for the NY Times, Pinker slapped Gladwell like this:
He … quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s...
My proud Monday: 4 Big Think posts, 1 Whitney...
1) What Does Growing Up in Gaza Mean for Peace?
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I’m here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip — a radicalized, blinkered, deprived existence, according to Lawrence Wright’s humane report for The New Yorker — bodes very badly for the future of peace.
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Tweeting from the scene: Citizen journalism or...
NYU Prof. Jay Rosen posted this on Twitter this morning: “Paul Carr is going contrarian on citizen journalism’s ass. Jerks with cell phones and Twitter accounts appall him http://jr.ly/mypg”
The Fort Hood killings, to hear Carr tell it, amount to “the perfect example to support my view” that “social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of...
“America doesn’t need a bigger army. It needs a smaller — that is,...”
– from The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich
I used this quote today on Global Pedestrian, my foreign-policy blog for Big Think. The post is called “Counterinsurgency (First in an Infinite List of Things I Might Be Wrong About).”
Today’s other Global Pedestrian posts are:
•...
My Jonathan Lethem post is on The New Yorker's... →
Macy Halford of The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” blog just linked to my recent post about Jonathan Lethem’s fantastic appearance here in Seattle. Luckily, she did more than link. She wrote about her own vast and mixed experiences at book events. Here’s an excerpt:
“If you’ve been to as many readings and discussions as I have, you know that they can be uncommonly...