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
Is this the end?
the gift and the curse of the remittance economy;
the smash sequel to Tony Award winner In The Heights: In the Penal Colony
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
“Dennis Rodman is a dime-dropper”;
nothing sells Swedish meatballs like goats on a roof;
in the land of felines, the man with a wheelbarrow full of catfood is king
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
