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
The great depression in color;
bringing up baby;
what our bookcases say about us;
counterculture reading list
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
Okay, but what happens when NPR listeners want to date each other?;
Huckabee shows how to dig a hole, then dig it deeper;
not a good look, lobbyists;
Ethiopia’s fascinating church forests
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