you're water

I recently had the opportunity to post some of my all-time favorite pieces of nonfiction on...

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:10:00 -0400

I recently had the opportunity to post some of my all-time favorite pieces of nonfiction on longform.org. Thought I’d share them here.

Host
David Foster Wallace // The Atlantic // April 2005

On conservative radio host John Ziegler and “the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient.”

Up in the old hotel
Joseph Mitchell // The New Yorker // June 1952

The author immerses himself and the reader in the Fulton Fish Market.

The Decade in Indie
Nitsuh Abebe // Pitchfork // Sep 2009

On the increasing tension between the pleasant, thoughtful indie rock of car commercials and those who insist on something weirder.

Photo

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:44:05 -0400

Photo

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:08:15 -0400

Rare Scenes from 9/11 // GQ

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 01:29:00 -0400

Rare Scenes from 9/11 // GQ

This Week's Must-Read: What Happened to Obama?

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:43:31 -0400

This Week's Must-Read: What Happened to Obama?:

kateoplis:

[…] Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues — and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.

Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far. […]

—Drew Westen

Carve out some time to read the whole piece.

Also, Paul Krugman’s reaction, and MoJo’s Kevin Drum’s thoughts.

The winner in a competition to redesign nutrition facts labels....

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:14:12 -0400

The winner in a competition to redesign nutrition facts labels. I love it.
Rething the Food Label

Lately, the conventional wisdom is that young people think far...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:07:00 -0400

Lately, the conventional wisdom is that young people think far too much of themselves—they’re coddled little zeppelins of ego in desperate need of shooting down. The cover of July’s Atlantic is emblazoned with the headline how THE CULT OF SELF-ESTEEM IS RUINING OUR KIDS; inside, quotes from psychologist Jean M. Twenge explain how we’re producing generations of feckless narcissists. Earlier this year, the online equivalent of applause greeted a study of pop lyrics from 1980 to 2007 in which a whole team of psychologists, Twenge included, claimed there’s been a rise in narcissism, self-regard, and antisocial hostility at the top of the Billboard charts: Songs have moved from we and us tome and I, and come over all ornery in the process. Surprised? New York Times columnist David Brooks, for one, already saw that as self-evident: “It’s nice,” he wrote, “to have somebody rigorously confirm an impression many of us have formed.”

[…]

One simple explanation for this development: We now have access to a ridiculous variety of media. The music we spend our private time on, and use to build our identities, varies more wildly than ever from person to person. But there’s at least one kind of music that needs consensus to function, and that’s the stuff we dance, party, and strut around to. “The club” might be the last remaining space where strangers are all forced to pay attention to the same songs. And whether it’s an actual club or just a bedroom, it tends to be a space where people enjoy feeling fabulous.

Another change that’s swept through the charts since 1980 is the steady disappearance of white men. In 1980, more than half the artists at No. 1 were white men; in 2010, the only white guy in the top spot was Eminem. Today’s pop world is female, African-American, and Latino, dance-pop and hip-hop and R&B. The audiences it’s usually associated with are female, African-American, Latin, gay, and young. And the music running through the charts is filled with qualities that look a lot like the aspirations and survival strategies of people who’ve felt marginalized—people for whom ego and self-worth can be existential issues, not just matters of etiquette.

We Must Be Superstars
Nitsuh Abebe // New York Magazine

Salon: The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 01:30:00 -0400

Salon: The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

DFW: It’s hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. “One Day at a Time,” right? I’m thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it’s so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as “One Day at a Time” enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

-David Foster Wallace

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get...

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:13:37 -0400

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

"In the safest, most boring country, the worst lone gunman shooting happens. The worst in the world,..."

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:29:25 -0400

“In the safest, most boring country, the worst lone gunman shooting happens. The worst in the world, in history. But it will not make our country worse. The safe, boring democracy will supply him with a defense lawyer as is his right. He will not get more than 21 years in prison as is the maximum extent of the law. Our democracy does not allow for enough punishment to satisfy my need for revenge, as is its intention. We will not become worse, we will be better. We lived in a land where this is possible, even easy. And we will keep living in a land where this is possible, even easy. We are open, we are free and we are together. We are vulnerable by choice. And we will keep on like that, that’s how we want to live. We will not be worse because of the worst. We must be good because of the best.”

- Ola (via youmightfindyourself)

Video

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 03:19:40 -0400

newsflick: Two-year-old, Aden Salaad, looks up toward his...

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:00:37 -0400

newsflick:

Two-year-old, Aden Salaad, looks up toward his mother, unseen, as she bathes him in a tub at a Doctors Without Borders hospital, where Aden is receiving treatment for malnutrition, in Dagahaley Camp, outside Dadaab, Kenya, Monday, July 11.

With a population of almost 400,000, the Dadaab Refugee Camp in north-east Kenya is beginning to resemble a city. Like in any fast-growing metropolis, the morning rush here can be a miserable time; the infrastructure creaks louder than at any other part of the day. This must be the most desperate rush-hour of any city in the world.

At around 8 a.m., a huge crowd of new residents begin to stream through the gates of the reception center. Most have been forced here by the worst drought to affect East Africa for 60 years – described by the United Nations as a “humanitarian emergency.” Continue reading.

11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That You Can’t

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:11:26 -0400

11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That You Can’t :

pantslessprogressive:

liquornspice:

The 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. aren’t just filthy rich, they are downright dirty. Collectively, these households own $1.37 trillion dollars; a number so high that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend. Here are 11 shocking things $1.37 trillion can buy that you can’t.

The richest 400 households can pay off every student loan for every single student in the entire United States. No more paying for an education, so that you can get a good job so that you can… well, pay off your education.

The richest 400 could pay your rent, and the rent of every single renter in the entire United States for three years.

The richest 400 could pay the mortgages of every house in the whole country for 14 full months.

The richest 400 households can buy every single house that was foreclosed on in 2007 and 2008.

The richest 400 households could pay the annual salaries of 19 million families for one year. So go ahead, take that year-long, family vacation around the world you’ve always dreamed of.

The richest 400 can pay off all credit card debt for every single person in the entire United States. Imagine that! No more credit card debt looming over your shoulders!

The richest 400 households can afford to give a $10,000 bonus to every single worker in the entire country. What would a hardworking person like you do with that extra money?

The richest 400 can afford to buy a new car for every family in the United States. Meanwhile, many of us must ignore the flashing check engine light.

The richest 400 can pay for 3 ½ years worth of gas for every driver in the country.

The richest 400 households can afford to triple the number of teachers in the United States, then give every single one a $30,000 raise. Teachers are being laid off everywhere, their salaries are being cut, and they are suffering. Teacher-to-student ratios in schools are abysmal. But what can we do about it when so much wealth is in the pockets of so few families?

The richest 400 families alone could replace 70% of all money lost in the Great Recession, for everyone! How much money did you, your parents, or grandparents lose in the Great Recession of 2008? 30%, 50% of your portfolio? Not only do the rich still have enough money to fund their wildest dreams, but they can also fund your retirements.

In today’s “argument for progressive taxation policies”…

pantslessprogressive: South Sudan. July 7. Children rehearse...

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:39:05 -0400

pantslessprogressive:

South Sudan. July 7. Children rehearse for the upcoming Independence Day ceremony in the capital of Juba.

South Sudan is expected to declare its independence and officially become a new nation on Saturday, July 9.

[Photo: Tyler Hicks/NY Times]

voa60news: Today’s VOA60 - World for July 6th, 2011 1. Libya:...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 16:59:56 -0400

voa60news:

Today’s VOA60 - World for July 6th, 2011

1. Libya: At least 11 Libyan rebels are killed in clashes with government forces near Misrata.

2. China: Officials say more than 20 are dead in massive landslides triggered by torrential rainstorms.

3. Nepal: Police arrest three Tibetans and prevent others from celebrating the Dalai Lama’s 76th birthday.

4. Pakistan: Targeted killings sparked by ethnic and political violence leave seven dead in Karachi.

5. Greece: Taxi drivers surround a government ministry building in a 24-hour protest against government reforms.

6. China: Snow tiger cubs fed by Siberian tiger because mother cannot feed all five.

VOA 60 is a 1 minute overview of the day’s top news stories — comprised of compelling video clips with simple captions. It is short, concise, and straight to the point so that viewers will be able to get their daily dose of news in less time.

A small fence separates Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United...

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 01:55:15 -0400

A small fence separates Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United States.

(via ATIS)

kateoplis: A grocery store in Islamabad (Muhammed Muheisen)

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:33:44 -0400

kateoplis:

A grocery store in Islamabad (Muhammed Muheisen)

soupsoup: Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor at the Atlantic, and...

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:17:05 -0400

soupsoup:

Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor at the Atlantic, and Felix Salmon discuss the changing landscape of blogs.

soupsoup: If you ever needed to know how not “New York” the...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:23:57 -0400

soupsoup:

If you ever needed to know how *not* “New York” the “New York Post” is, let this be your guide.

What's the real minimum wage?

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:30:12 -0400

What's the real minimum wage?:

cheatsheet:

With unemployment in the U.S. sticking at a stubborn 9 percent, we wondered how desperate people might be to get paid. So we decided to conduct an experiment to figure out the real minimum wage, not only in the U.S., but around the world. Here’s how we did it:

Over several weeks, we used Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for freelance work operated by Amazon.com, to post simple, hour-long jobs to see how much or how little we’d need to pay workers. Specifically, we offered to hire people who would listen to a one-hour recording of Tom Weber, our managing editor, reading snippets from old articles along with an excerpt from Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. The recording was sprinkled with repeated instances of unusual key words, such as “polyunsaturated” and “knuckleduster.” The proposition to our potential workers: Download the audio file, listen to the hour long recording and count the instances of a key word we specified, and get paid. Each time a worker accomplished the task, we reposted the job at a lower wage, and repeated as necessary until we found the absolute bottom price that gave us takers.

Our findings: U.S. workers provide the cheapest labor force of all. Workers agreed to do the job for a shockingly low 25 cents an hour.

you're water

I recently had the opportunity to post some of my all-time favorite pieces of nonfiction on...

Photo

Photo

Rare Scenes from 9/11 // GQ

This Week's Must-Read: What Happened to Obama?

The winner in a competition to redesign nutrition facts labels....

Lately, the conventional wisdom is that young people think far...

Salon: The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly...

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get...

"In the safest, most boring country, the worst lone gunman shooting happens. The worst in the world,..."

Video

newsflick: Two-year-old, Aden Salaad, looks up toward his...

11 Things the Richest U.S. Households Can Buy That You Can’t

pantslessprogressive: South Sudan. July 7. Children rehearse...

voa60news: Today’s VOA60 - World for July 6th, 2011 1. Libya:...

A small fence separates Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United...

kateoplis: A grocery store in Islamabad (Muhammed Muheisen)

soupsoup: Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor at the Atlantic, and...

soupsoup: If you ever needed to know how *not* “New York” the...

What's the real minimum wage?

soupsoup: If you ever needed to know how not “New York” the...