From February 1958.

I recently reorganised the books in my study, and collected my remnants of feminist theory on a separate shelf; a fragment of another world. There were copies of Feminist Review, work by Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly. There was also Adrienne Rich’s pamphlet, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” a dense and learned tract about the repression of lesbians. Consciousness-raising made little distinction between street and boardroom thuggery and the effects of laws in repressive states…. Consensual homosexual acts between adults are still illegal in as many as 70 countries. Most countries have moved to a liberalisation of those unjust and repressive laws. In Uganda, however, the Hon David Bahati has sponsored an anti-homosexuality bill far more draconian than the already existing code…. Bahati wants to get rid of those pesky “sexual rights activists seeking to impose their values of sexual promiscuity”, as well as gay pornographers and paedophiles. There is no distinction in his mind between people who fall in love with people of their own gender, and sexual sleaze and crime: it’s all a filthy mess of HIV, pornography, western values, decadence, feminism and predation. The draft bill separates “the offence of homosexuality” from “aggravated homosexuality.” –“Uganda is Sanctioning Gay Genocide,” Sigrid Rausing, New Statesman

Armstrong’s lack of prejudice extended to Jews, an attitude that was comparatively rare among blacks of his generation. Outside his marriages, his closest adult relationship was with Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster from Chicago who became his manager in 1935 and with whom he was intimately associated from then on. Armstrong described Glaser as “my dearest friend,” and those who knew both men well agreed that this was nothing more than the truth. He was similarly admiring of the Karnofskys, a family of Jewish peddlers from Lithuania for whom he had worked as a boy in New Orleans. In 1969 he wrote a lengthy memoir of his relationship with the Karnofskys called “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” … The young Armstrong saw the Karnofskys’ problems up close, for they took him under their wing, treating him almost like a relative. “They were always warm and kind to me, which was very noticeable to me— just a kid who could use a little word of kindness,” he recalled. He shared meals with them and borrowed money from them to buy his first cornet. Thereafter he would identify with the Karnofskys and the other Jews of New Orleans so closely that he became an ardent philo-Semite who wore a Star of David around his neck (Joe Glaser gave it to him). “I will love the Jewish people, all of my life,” he wrote, adding that he learned from them “how to live— real life and determination.” –“Satchmo and the Jews,” Terry Teachout, Commentary

Money gives us pleasure, Brecht needlessly told us, but that is not what will be meant here— not the kind of pleasure ignited by money because we lust after the unlimited opportunities it promises. We should rather be thinking of something more banal and mysterious: of the intrinsic sensuousness of the actual money itself— small metal discs, or oblong strips of rustling, crackling paper. In Balzac, an artist tries to marry into a bourgeois family; he carelessly remarks that money is there to be spent—since it is round, it must roll. The father of the family, reacting with the deepest mistrust, replies: “If it is round for prodigals, it is flat for economical people who pile it up.” The opposite approaches of the bohemian and the rentier (by the end of the tale they have comfortably fused) converge in images of the concrete pleasures of money. Both are thinking of the ways in which hands unconsciously encircle coins, a physical sensation. One man high-spiritedly lets them roll loose, the other deliberately stacks them on top of each other, with greedy precision. The spendthrift and the miser both feel the coins between their fingers. –“Money as We Knew It?” Joachim Kalka, New Left Review

From November 1958.

As a devoted football fan, you are undoubtedly aware of the phrase “not in my house,” a defiant cri de coeur that is generally shouted by a swaggering defensive end who’s just sunk a running back for a loss on third-and-short. Well, imagine for a moment that the Almighty is a 265-pound linebacker with meaty arms, a penchant for smashmouthiness, and one of those scary dark visors on His helmet. –“The Texanist: Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church?” by David Courtney, Texas Monthly (via)

While it was previously unclear just what food was on the table, we now see that it is neither Paschal lamb nor, as some had supposed, bread alone. There are three large serving platters in the picture, and although the one in front of Christ is empty, the two before Andrew and Matthew—the fourth figures to his right and left—are heaped with food. The plate to our left appears to contain about half a dozen whole fish, while the one on the right is damaged to the point of being all but illegible. Fortunately, the preservation of the three small serving dishes on the right side of the composition is sufficiently good to suggest that we are looking at, in fact, sections of grilled eel garnished with orange slices. Other pieces of fruit—pomegranates perhaps, some still with their leaves attached—complete the menu along with plenty of bread and wine, the only sacramental necessities in any depiction of the Last Supper. –“History’s Table: At Supper with Leonardo,” John Varriano (PDF), in Gastronomica (via)

And then there’s the sad fact of the “dancing” [in the big wheelchair number in Glee]; the choreography sucks. The one potentially interesting move that McHale supposedly “does” is a cut– he wheelies on one rear wheel. The rest is notable only for the way that it shows that able-bodied, non-wheelchair-using folk really do think of chairs as bicycles you move with your arms. There’s absolutely no body-chair integration at all. They think of sitting in a chair as being only about not being able to move their legs (and in Artie’s case as being about having his hips and legs twisted to one side). That mistaken understanding leads to some very weird-looking people in chairs. On chairs would be a better phrase for it. The fake paralysis of their legs somehow wends its way up their bodies so that they are really only able to push with their elbows (no wonder they have sore arms!). –“Glee,” Wheelchair Dancer

From November 1958.

“Maybe this is too personal,” says Charlotte, “but I wasn’t as careful with my virginity, with my heart and my body, when I was a teenager, and maybe that’s where I’m escaping to. I’m rescuing the shy virgin in me that didn’t get to be a shy virgin as long. I want Bella to be protected. And Edward does that. Albeit in a scary, dangerous way.” She’s careful to say, however, that her regression is pretty benign. It’s not like she actually wants to be 15 again…. Actually, what “Twilight” has brought flooding back for many fans is not just the high drama of first love and betrayal but warm memories of a different relationship altogether. “For so many of these women, this is the first book they’ve read cover to cover in 10 years,” says Kirsten Starkweather. “Now they’re grabbing the new book, whatever it is.” Charlotte agrees. “Reading is an act of defiance in the world today. I owe Stephenie Meyer a thank you note for reminding me of that.” –“‘Twilight’ of Our Youth: It isn’t just a tween phenomenon. Women in their 30s and beyond are addicted to Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga, too,” Sarah Hepola, Salon

White geek Nick Douglas had a theory about Black People Twitter a while ago. His friend suggested “These people don’t have real Twitter friends. So they all respond to trending topics.” This is so obviously wrong. (“No, they have their own communities and their own friends that you are not paying attention to,” wrote Maria Diaz.) And then Douglas himself posted a great response to his poor dumb friend: “It’s the nature of how we craft these environments to suit our core comforts and fine tune our twitter experiences. Twitter’s addition of the trending topics bar has simply shattered our insulated perception of how everyone uses this thing.” –“What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night?” by Choire Sicha, The Awl

In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm. –“Phys Ed: Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious,” Gretchen Reynolds, The New York Times

From January 1952.

Over the past few years the U.S. military has been engaged in an extensive internal debate about counter-insurgency warfare. This is partly a debate about COIN tactics and techniques — in other words, about how to do COIN better — but the more important debate is about the priority that COIN should receive in U.S. defense planning. Specifically, should the United States continue to focus primarily on preparing for “great power” wars and strive to retain “command of the commons” through air power, naval power, and other sophisticated warfare capabilities, or should it retool for the various small wars that it seems to have been fighting lately?… Unfortunately, this line of argument ignores the fact that these wars are the result of past American mistakes. The first error was the failure to capture Bin Laden and his associates at the battle of Tora Bora, which allowed Al Qaeda’s leaders to escape into Pakistan and thus ensured that the United States would become enmeshed in Afghanistan… The second mistake was the foolish decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which led us into yet another costly insurgency. Not surprisingly, those charged with waging that war eventually focused on COIN, because that was the problem they were expected to solve. But the only reason they had to do so was the fact that the Bush Administration decided to wage an unnecessary war in the first place. In short, the current obsession with counterinsurgency is the direct result of two fateful errors. We didn’t get Bin Laden when we should have, and we invaded Iraq when we shouldn’t. Had the United States not made those two blunders, we wouldn’t have been fighting costly counterinsurgencies and we wouldn’t be contemplating a far-reaching revision of U.S. defense priorities and military doctrine. –“Building on 2 Blunders: the dubious case for counterinsurgency,” Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy

My love and I had come to Paris in search of the mythic cheeses said to thrive an ocean away from the FDA. At longing last, we were in our tiny rental in the Marais, hovered over a single plate, tasting a Langres. This cheese, as it’s described in one rather bland guide, originates from the high plains of Langres in Champagne. It is shaped like a cylinder and has a deep well on top called a fontaine, a kind of basin into which Champagne or marc may be poured. This is a pleasant way to eat this cheese, and is characteristic of wine-producing regions. We didn’t have the funds for Champagne on this evening, but we had managed to get tipsy on a serviceable vin de pays, which is also a pleasant way to eat a Langres….“It doesn’t play well with others,” [my love said,] the thick smack of pâté slowing her speech. “It doesn’t respect lesser cheese.” “It’s like a road trip through Arizona in an old Buick,” I offered. “It’s like Charlus, but early in Proust.” “It has a half-life inside your teeth.” “It has ideas.” “It gradually peels off the skin on the roof of your mouth.“ “It attains absolute crustiness and absolute creaminess.” The problem with most descriptions of cheese, the sort you find in guides, is that they’re reductive. Officially, the Langres is sticky, wet, shiny, firm, and supple, “melts in the mouth,” and has “a complex mixture of aromas.” Such descriptions convey, at best, a blueprint of the tasting experience, like a score does a symphony.–“Illegal Cheese,” Eric Lemay, Gastronomica

One of the most notable characteristics of Ouija lore is the vast-and sometimes authentically frightening-history of stories reported by users. A common story line involves communication that is at first reassuring and even useful–a lost object may be recovered through the board’s counsel–but eventually gives way to threatening or terrorizing messages. One group of Ouija enthusiasts reported ghostly knocks on their apartment doors after contacting the spirit of a serial killer. Others claimed physical and sexual assaults from unseen hands after a night of Ouija experimentation. One famous murder trial in 1933 involved claims that Ouija had “commanded” an Arizona girl and her mother to kill the girl’s father. Hugh Lynn Cayce, the soft-spoken son of the famous American psychic Edgar Cayce, once cautioned that his research found Ouija boards among the most “dangerous doorways to the unconscious.” –“Ouija,” Parabola

From October 1923.

But China– or Mao’s China, which was the only one on view to Westerners in 1974—was entirely opaque to him, a string of stereotypes, or bricks, as he called them, borrowing a term from cybernetics. The one thing he loved was what he had already seen in Japan: calligraphy, “their only work of art,” he said of the Chinese, “absolute counter-vulgarity.” “The rest: Soviet realism.” He dutifully toured the factories and schools and museums with his friends; he listened to the same sermons again and again; he had migraines; enjoyed the food; made an effort every now and again to get a bit of semiotic mileage out of the repeating signs. One result of this was an essay he published in Le Monde: “Alors, la Chine?” Alors, nothing much, was the answer. Barthes had seen Antonioni’s 1972 film about China– he told the director that it was the reason he took the trip– and kept returning to the sense that he had nothing to add to that portrait. On one of his last days there he drew up a kind of balance sheet. He couldn’t write favourably of the place or coherently criticise it. “Impossible,” he said of both options. He didn’t want merely to describe his experiences: that would be “phenomenology,” meaning, I take it, just phenomenology. All that was left was “Antonioni,” an approach that had been excoriated in China and in the West as a betrayal of the Revolution. –“Presence of Mind,” Michael Wood, London Review of Books

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. –“Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective,” Steven Pinker, The New York Times

For Hans, it is hardly a surprise that much of Shakespeare does resonate so in Punjab. “For the English, Shakespeare is something sacred,” he tells me, “They are incapable of a natural response. Our response, on the other hand, is not born of ritual admiration. The plots make sense to us, you want to read King John, think of the story of Aurangzeb. Take the Two Noble Kinsmen, and the plot is no different from any Hindustani film. Two cousins fight over the same woman. One claims he has the right to her hand because he loves her more, the other says she is his because he saw her first. They both die fighting.” Hans doesn’t have to say it, but even as we speak, somewhere in a Punjab village, a similar story may well be playing itself out. There are other correspondences that may be mapped too. “We share an attitude with the England of Shakespeare’s times—it extends to matters such as wine, women, wealth and even sex. The psychology of death is similar.” There are differences as well. For one, Hans is quick to point out, Punjabis lack the idea of courtesy that is so central to English culture. –“Though This Be Madness, There Is Method In’t: After sixteen years of work, Surjit Hans’ mission of translating all of Shakespeare into Punjabi is nigh an end,” Hartosh Singh Bal, Open (via)

From June 1923.

The inspiration for the name [Blue Dog] comes from several sources. It’s a play on the old phrase “Yellow Dog Democrat”—for those who’d sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. It expresses the sense of the group’s founders, in 1995, that they were being “choked blue” by their party’s liberals. And most surprisingly, it is partly homage to the Cajun artist George Rodrigue, specifically his famous faux-naif painting of a blue Chihuahua, copies of which adorned the office walls of two Louisiana members who hosted early organizational meetings…. The Blue Dog Coalition has proven attractive to members who, for various reasons, want to be seen as having a centrist credential. One finds entrenched veterans like Jane Harman of California’s district covering the southern beaches; she is one of the House’s richest members (her husband owns Harman-Kardon, which makes stereo equipment) and is liberal on almost all matters except national security, having supported the Iraq war and survived a 2006 primary challenge from a candidate who criticized her for doing so. And there are newcomers with wobbly support in their districts—the wobbliest of all, by seeming consensus among Congress-watchers, being Walt Minnick of Idaho, a one-time Nixon aide of libertarian bent who resigned in protest over the Saturday Night Massacre, became a Democrat in 1996, and won a close race in a very Republican district. He was helped along when his opponent was caught heckling a Minnick aide during a television interview (and by $900,000 of his own money). Just six members of the fifty-two-member Blue Dog group are women, two are Latino, and none is African-American.–“Who Are the Blue Dogs?” Michael Tomasky, The New York Review of Books

Robyn, 30

What have you learned about sex and dating from reading the Twilight series? What could men learn if they read the books?

The intensity of being drawn together by chemistry is amazingly sexy. Being so focused on each other, and having such a deep passion for one another. That’s what I’ve learned.

Grace, 18

What’s the best way to pick up a Twilight fan?

Whisper in their ear, “You’re my personal brand of heroin.”

Jeff, 23

My new girlfriend gets a little rough in the bedroom. The other day she bit my shoulder — hard! It was more disturbing than hot, but I love how worked up she gets. How can I tell her not to draw blood, without sounding like a wimp?

Everyone needs a good bite once in a while, but for most of us, there’s definitely a pain threshold we’d rather not cross. I always find a simple, earnest “Ow!” usually breaks the mood enough to get your point across without stopping the momentum. Or, she could be a vampire. A little blood isn’t such a bad price to pay in return for eternal awesomeness. –“Sex Advice From: Twi-Hards,” Nerve

Opening a kilo of coke takes time. The outside layer of this particular package bears a colorful pattern of palm trees that makes it look like a birthday present, a thick paperback maybe. Other layers nest beneath the trees: layers of plastic, of carbon paper, of tracing and butcher paper, one stamped producto de calidad and numbered. Below the first layers, the entire brick is slathered in diesel-engine degreaser to keep it moist and mask the smell from detection dogs. Jesse attacks the package with a pocketknife and his fingers, showing neither haste nor undue caution. After all, he has done this many times before. Yet there is something about the kilo that makes it different from the rest; it is, Jesse says, the first kilo of the last shipment of cocaine that he will sell here in Pittsburgh, bringing to a close a successful career that began when he was eleven. –“Game Over,” Robert Anasi, Virginia Quarterly Review;

From June 1965.

It’s so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment that I like to call “shitasmia.” It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It’s the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history. Watch it for yourself. Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft’s bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. –“Better the Broken Windows than Life with the Mac Monks,” Charlie Brooker, The Sydney Morning Herald (via)

A little more than a year after his death it seems fair to say that Mahmoud Darwish, one of the past century’s signal poets, has finally arrived in English. Six substantial collections of his work have been translated in the past three years and several others are on the way, a level of attention publishers usually reserve for Nobel Prize winners. With a little luck, Darwish might one day join that small group of foreign poets—like Lorca, Cavafy, or Mandelstam—whose idiom becomes a touchstone for peers writing in English. But the Darwish that has begun to come into view for English language readers is, of course, quite different from the one his Arab audience is familiar with. –“Mourning Tongues,” Robyn Creswell, The National

In truth, agreement on the cause of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (when not only the dinosaurs, but also a host of other species died) has never been as cut and dried among palaeontologists as it may have appeared to the public. One confounding factor is that the late Cretaceous was also a period of great volcanic activity. In India, which was then an island continent like Australia is today (it did not collide with Asia until 50m years ago), huge eruptions created fields of basalt called the Deccan Traps. Before the discovery of Chicxulub, the climate-changing effects of these eruptions had been put forward as an explanation for the death of the dinosaurs. After its discovery, some argued that even if the eruptions did not cause the extinction, they weakened the biosphere and made it particularly vulnerable to the Chicxulub hammer-blow. –“I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds,” The Economist

From June 1965.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

ECO: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

–“SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco,” Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, Spiegel Online

Dr. Rines’s passion about the Loch Ness monster was kindled in 1972 when he was in Scotland on his honeymoon with the former Carol Williamson, his second wife. They were enjoying tea with a friend whose home overlooked the loch. Their host remarked, “I say, is that an upturned boat?” What they saw was a big, grayish hump with the texture of an elephant’s skin. It rose four feet out of the water and seemed to be about 30 feet long. They stared at it for 10 minutes. “I don’t care what anybody thinks, you have to find out what that was,” Mrs. Rines said. The obsession had begun. –“Robert Rines, Inventor and Monster Hunter, Dies at 87,” Douglas Martin, The New York Times

TEACHER: Let’s start analyzing the text, everybody pay attention. Who’s going to read the first part? Everyone else pay attention and conclude what the theme of this segment is.

STUDENT: (reads)

TEACHER: Here, everyone focus on this sentence. It is a metaphor. Is this a direct or indirect metaphor? Why does the author use it?

STUDENTS: (N number of people start to sleep)

–“Teaching the Cinderella Fairytale: China vs. America,” Mop via ChinaSmack

From February 1977.

Hacks’s politics were hard to ignore. Bertolt Brecht advised him not to move to East Germany in the early nineteen-fifties…but Hacks moved anyway. And although his plays got him in trouble with the authorities on occasion, he remained an ardent defender of Soviet-style socialism. The Greeks and Romans who inhabited his plays sometimes called each other comrade; the plays were often allegories about the moral emptiness of the West. Hacks himself lived comfortably south of Berlin in a walled-off villa with a statue of Priapus in the garden…. Hacks became, if anything, more confrontational after East Germany collapsed. His 1998 poem “Venus and Stalin” was a lightly erotic homage to the Soviet dictator. He eulogized the Berlin wall as the “most beautiful world wonder”, proposed setting up a guillotine on Leninplatz for troublemakers, and dismissed the events of November 1989 as “counterrevolution”. –“In Berlin, A Peter Hacks Renaissance,” Nathan Thornburgh, The New Yorker

One recalls the coeds being fetched home from their dormitories to Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids in those days when the end of the world seemed at hand. In their plaid kilt skirts with the large decorative fake gold safety pins; the chilled red kneecaps, raw in the northern light; the silent fathers packing the cheap imitation leather suitcases into the trunks of the Detroit iron cars. What was there to say. The incipient end of the world was that of which one could not speak, and anyway it was cold and getting late, the motor was running…. In my roominghouse in those days of the incipient end of the world there were discussions all night and on into the morning. If the world was about to end, that must mean there was evil in the universe, for we all of us regarded the end of the world as an evil prospect indeed. But if the world were to end there would be no winners, so exactly who would be pleased, who would benefit? Do the evils suffered on this globe, by some inconceivable means, contribute to the felicity of the inhabitants of some remote planet? we asked. Though these questions were never answered then, and in the long interim since that time nothing significant has happened that I am now able to remember, to distract me from them, they have continued to haunt me. –“The Problem of Evil,” Tom Clark, Exquisite Corpse

On Holy Saturday we spent the evening at the Stardust Hotel with Wayne Newton—in the most expensive seats: a table for six that abutted the U-shaped stage on which Wayne frolicked. I’d pushed for this outing, though my sisters and mom toppled easily. We’d seen Cirque du Soleil the night before, and after ten minutes all that spandexed contortion looked the same—I wanted old Vegas. I wanted shtick. I got it. Oh my goodness, Wayne was old. His hair, black as pitch, gleamed as if it had just been buffed at the shoeshine stand in the lobby. His mustache gleamed, too. He wore a tux. The audience was full of people like us: that is, ladies. At the highest pitch of the show, Wayne, bowtie released and hanging round his neck, shirt unbuttoned to show a chest that appeared shaved, and cummerbund cinched like a heavyweight’s belt, sang his trademark “Danke Schoen.” He made his way around the stage as he did this, reaching down to those who sat at the tables alongside it, touching outstretched hands, kissing cheeks. Too late, we realized our mistake in sitting in these stage-side seats. Wayne, all snap and swagger, arrived at our table, expecting to be kissed. He leaned down. He gleamed with effort. His makeup was thick. He offered his cheek for our lips. He held out his hands to accept our adoration. And instead, my mom, my sisters, and I, as if we’d been choreographed, leaned away from him, recoiling. Wayne, a pro, didn’t miss a beat as he moved on to the next table of ladies, these eager to love him, while we looked into our drinks, sheepish at how instinctively rude we’d just been. –Kissing Wayne Newton,” Ellen Slezak, Agni

From January 1965.

By the 1970s, a Soviet math establishment had taken shape. A totalitarian system within a totalitarian system, it provided its members not only with work and money but also with apartments, food, and transportation. It determined where they lived and when, where, and how they traveled for work or pleasure. To those in the fold, it was a controlling and strict but caring mother: Her children were undeniably privileged. Even for members of the math establishment, though, there were always too few good apartments, too many people wanting to travel to a conference. So it was a vicious, back-stabbing little world, shaped by intrigue, denunciations and unfair competition. –“Russia’s Conquering Zeros: The strength of post-Soviet math stems from decades of lonely productivity,” Masha Gessen, The Wall Street Journal

“I thought, ‘Health reform? Yay!’ ” said Lynn McAfee, the director of medical advocacy for the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, an advocacy group for heavy people. But Ms. McAfee said it was not long before her sentiment changed to the more sober, “Oh no, we’re being scapegoated again.” –“Heavier Americans Push Back on Health Debate,” Susan Saulny, The New York Times

People who gush over Proust say peculiar things about him. The Observer’s Robert McCrum thinks he “redefined the terms of fiction”, whatever they may be. Proust would have been surprised to be told he had defined anything. In a momentary lapse into barbarism, Nabokov, himself a consummate stylist, described Proust’s prose as “translucid.” If Proust did not make such a snobbish to-do about diction, it might be easier to forgive him for his battering of the sentence to rubble and his apparent contempt for the paragraph. He relies on commas and semi-colons to do what should be done by full-stops, of which there are far too few, many of them in the wrong place. Sentences run to thousands of words and scores of subordinate clauses, until the reader has no recollection of the main clause or indeed whether there ever was one. –“Why Do People Gush Over Proust? I’d rather visit a demented relative,” Germaine Greer, The Guardian

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