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Chaaveesse

2012-02-19T09:17:00.001-08:00

The governor's mansion in Barinas, a smaller version of La Casona, is a rambling house with a colonnaded veranda and a garden filled with shade trees. The governor's office contains a wheezy air-conditioner, a large portrait of Bolívar, and two carved wooden busts—one of Hugo Chávez and one of Christ. On a side table there is a photograph of Hugo's mother, Doña Elena, with Daniel Ortega, the former Nicaraguan Sandinista leader. Ortega has his arm around her. I was entertained first by the youngest Chávez brother, forty-year-old Adelis, a pleasant-looking man with a wide jaw and straight black hair. Adelis was wearing a gray business suit and a pink floral tie with a gold tiepin. He also wore a gold vanity bracelet, a gold ring with a diamond inset, a gold pen in his suit pocket, and a gold lapel pin.

Adelis, who had recently become a corporate vice-president at the Banco Sofitasa, said that he had learned to "immunize" himself from the political gossip that swirled around the family, and especially around his brother the President. But he was indignant, he conceded, about being called a thief, as had happened not long ago, when he bought a new house. "I bought it with my own savings, and with credit from a bank, and not the bank I work for," he said. I asked Adelis if he had any political ambitions of his own. He smiled and said no, he was quite content to remain in the private sector for the foreseeable future. He had recently won the state franchise for a major Venezuelan mobile-telephone network. "I had no idea these phone concessions were so lucrative," he said. "It's a really profitable business!"

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Jnu

2012-02-19T09:14:00.001-08:00

In April, a group of students occupied the administrative offices of the Central University of Venezuela, the largest school in the country. The students complained that the university was run by a "professorial aristocracy." Douglas Bravo was with the protesters the day I visited the campus. Bravo is a short, dapper man in his late sixties. He was conferring with young men wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. One of them, Pavel, an engineering student in his early twenties, explained what they were fighting for. "The university has not fulfilled its social role," he said. "It is divorced from the society around it. It has become a mummy, a sepulchre, and we want each classroom to be linked to the society outside the campus." Bravo explained that the university takeover was an essential step forward in what he called "the interrupted process of the Bolivarian revolution." What happened next depended to a large extent on Chávez. "He allies himself either with the forces of globalization," Bravo said, "or with the masses."

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Article: The End of Cheap Coffee [longform.org]

2012-02-18T08:23:00.001-08:00

The End of Cheap Coffee [longform.org]
http://www.good.is/post/the-end-of-cheap-coffee/

A luxury drink, that is. "Coffee as cheap fuel for the masses is a historical anomaly," says Peter Giuliano, director of coffee at the North Carolina-based roaster Counter Culture. "There's no nutritive value. It's drunk just for the pleasure of it. It's a total miracle of global agriculture, a feat that spans cultures and countries."

Mother Nature might be on the side of Giuliano and his cohorts. At the exact moment that rare beans are becoming all the rage, all beans are becoming rarer. The price of a cup of coffee—whether it be a $6 pour-over, a $2.50 dark roast at Starbucks, or a $1.50 mug of diner swill—is being driven up by a complex combination of weather events, pest and fungus outbreaks, speculation on commodities exchanges, an unstable labor market in the developing world, and an unprecedented thirst for good coffee among a growing global middle class. The problem, in simple economic terms, is that supply has gone down and demand has gone up.

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Article: Why American Novelists Don’t Deserve the Nobel Prize [letsgetcritical.org]

2012-02-13T11:42:00.001-08:00

Why American Novelists Don't Deserve the Nobel Prize [letsgetcritical.org]
http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/03/why_americans_don_t_win_nobel/singleton/

Our great writers choose this self-enforced isolation. Worse yet, they have inculcated younger generations of American novelists with the write-what-you-know mantra through their direct and indirect influence on creative programs. Go small, writing students are urged, and stay interior. Avoid inhabiting the lives of those unlike you — never dream of doing what William Styron did in "The Confessions of Nat Turner," putting himself inside the impregnable skin of a Southern slave. Avoid, too, making the kinds of vatic pronouncements about Truth and Beauty that enticed all those 19th-century blowhards.

As Bret Anthony Johnson, the director of the creative writing program at Harvard, noted in a recent Atlantic essay, our focus on the self will be our literary downfall, depriving literature of the oxygen on which it thrives: "Fiction brings with it an obligation to rise past the base level, to transcend the limitations of fact and history, and proceed skyward." This sentiment is a sibling to Wallace's anger — and both have a predecessor in T.S. Eliot's 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where he called art "a continual extinction of personality."

The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists — even the writers who aren't male (or white). Jhumpa Lahiri is a Great Male Narcissist whose characters tend to be upper-middle-class Indian-Americans living in the comfortable precincts of Boston or New York. Swap the identity to Chinese-American, move the story a couple of generations back on the immigrant's well-trod saga, and you have Amy Tan. Colson Whitehead started promisingly with "The Intuitionist" and "John Henry Days" but his last novel, "Sag Harbor," was little more than the bourgeoisie life made gently problematic by the issue of race. Jonathan Safran Foer is a narcissist disguised as a humanist. To his credit, Jonathan Franzen doesn't even pretend.

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sankhara

2012-02-11T23:46:00.001-08:00

"The whole system is giving very ambitious people much less chance to reinvent themselves," said Jaron Lanier, author of "You Are Not a Gadget," and the change is less dramatic. Who would Bob Dylan end up, he wondered, if Zimmerman were there with him the whole time?

Article: Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure [longform.org]

2012-02-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

Barack and Hamid's Excellent Adventure [longform.org]
http://drug-trafficking.blogspot.com/2010/07/barack-and-hamids-excellent-adventure.html

Hillary enters, apple-cheeked—you can imagine her in one of those nineteenth-century portraits of white-wigged secretaries of state like John Quincy Adams or John Hay. As a feminist, she is a true believer in the cause of Afghan freedom, which puts her here in a minority of one. Eikenberry, a tall man in a good suit who used to be a lieutenant general, was opposed to the surge, because the Afghan government—whose ministers he knows better than any other American in the room does—was corrupt and unable to run the country effectively. Having spent more than twenty hours on a plane with Karzai and his ministers circumnavigating clouds of volcanic ash, Eikenberry is now even better equipped to evaluate the men in whose pockets much of America's $276-billion investment in Afghanistan now resides. Appearing at a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Eikenberry was asked whether his opinion of Karzai had changed. "President Karzai is the—he's the elected president of Afghanistan," Eikenberry said, falling back on the military man's necessary obeisance to the idiocy of legal authority.

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Article: Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure [longform.org]

2012-02-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

Barack and Hamid's Excellent Adventure [longform.org]
http://drug-trafficking.blogspot.com/2010/07/barack-and-hamids-excellent-adventure.html

"I saw Roger Ailes," says an older woman in a blue turtleneck sweater. "He said I should send him an email." She turns to her friend. "We're all independents now." Half the reporters look carb-faced and swollen from eating too much junk food while meeting late-night deadlines. Maybe a quarter are gym-toned fanatics like the president and his wife. No one smokes on the White House grounds. A minder in a navy-blue suit walks by. "Another ten minutes, folks. Ten minutes."

The reporters practice their questions, as if this were still the old days and raising their hands meant that there was even a slight chance they might be called upon. In fact, Obama hasn't had a real press conference in almost a year, which is the longest period of such abstinence since anyone began keeping track. The reporters who get to ask questions are selected weeks in advance by the White House. Still, pretending is helpful for morale.

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Article: On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]

2012-02-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/10/hitchens200710.print

The trouble with bad habits is that they are mutually reinforcing. And, just as a bank won't lend you money unless you are too rich to need it, exercise is a pastime only for those who are already slender and physically fit. It just isn't so much fun when you have a marked tendency to wheeze and throw up, and a cannonball of a belly sloshing around inside the baggy garments. In my case, most of my bad habits are connected with the only way I know to make a living. In order to keep reading and writing, I need the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply. To be crouched over a book or a keyboard, with these conditions of mingled reverie and alertness, is my highest happiness. (Upon having visited the doctor, Jean-Paul Sartre was offered the following alternative: Give up cigarettes and carry on into a quiet old age and a normal death, or keep smoking and have his toes cut off. Then his feet. Then his legs. Assessing his prospects, Sartre told Simone de Beauvoir he "wanted to think it over." He actually did retire his gaspers, but only briefly. Later that year, asked to name the most important thing in his life, he replied, "Everything. Living. Smoking

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Article: On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]

2012-02-11T03:57:00.000-08:00

On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/10/hitchens200710.print

I should then, of course, have discovered that I was locked in and that my evening meal of oatmeal, prunes, and mineral water would shortly be served. But, no, I was free to go. Now, I don't know about you, but with me a feeling of fitness and well-being always lends extra zest to the cocktail hour. And what's a cocktail without a smoke? And what else gives you a better appetite for dinner? The Bella Vista restaurant at the Biltmore is justly renowned, and I thought that perhaps if I tried the tasting menu Chef Martin Frost had prepared for me, with just a little morsel for each course … And a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine, as they say in France. And so the long night wore on agreeably enough.

In the morning, none too early, I descended to the beach to begin my program of yoga stretching. It was not thought advisable that I do this by myself—muscles become like mussels at my stage of life, and if not stretched carefully will either lose their elasticity or else snap with a sudden "pop" that I have already once, and disconcertingly, heard as I made the mistake of running for the phone. (Why did I do that?) I thus had the exhausting experience of watching my yoga instructor, the divine Madeline McCuskey, as she showed me the moves. Even regarding her in this way was a workout of a kind. Not to be outdone by some tempestuous and tawny Californian, I attempted to balance and extend myself in the same way, only to find that I was seized by the sensation that I might die or go mad at any moment.

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Article: On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]

2012-02-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

On the Limits of Self-Improvement: Part 1 [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/10/hitchens200710.print

Proceeding south and passing over an almost vanished neck that cannot bear the strain of a fastened top button or the constriction of a tie, we come to a thickly furred chest that, together with a layer of flab, allows the subject to face winter conditions with an almost ursine insouciance. The upper part of this chest, however, has slid deplorably down to the mezzanine floor, and it is our opinion that without his extraordinary genital endowment the subject would have a hard time finding the damn thing, let alone glimpsing it from above.

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Article: In Praise of Borders - NYTimes.com

2012-02-11T03:34:00.000-08:00

In Praise of Borders - NYTimes.com
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/in-praise-of-borders/?hp

While that is a lot less profoundly and more succinctly put, it is essentially the same sentiment expounded by the French theorist Régis Debray in his polemical essay "Éloge des frontières" ("In Praise of Borders"): "A stupid idea has enthralled the West: humanity, which is not doing too well, would fare better without borders … What if this sans-frontiérisme was nothing but illusion, escapism, cowardice? Around the world, and against all odds, new and ancient borders are being drawn or redrawn … I choose to celebrate what others deplore: the border as a vaccine against the epidemic of walls, a remedy to indifference, a rescue for the living."

In the 1960s, Mr. Debray fought at the side of Che Guevara — in a decidedly internationalist struggle, it might be said — but he has since, in a manner not uncommon to aging revolutionaries, shifted his views slightly rightward, in defense of traditions and particularities he sees threatened by "mondialisation" (or even worse, by "les anglo-saxons").

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Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique [via longfo

2012-02-09T00:46:00.000-08:00

There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn't authentic New York-style? Sure, it's entirely possible to arrive at one's own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it's also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own. Life demands assessment. Indeed, it's often improved by hearing from the Roger Eberts of the world (or whoever the equivalent is in the Review Your Purchases genre). But we have to watch how much outside assessment we let in. There's something heartbreaking about surrendering to strangers the delicate moment of giving order to the world. In those instances when we bring our cognitive reasoning to bear on our surroundings, when we aim our singularly human powers of evaluation at a piece of art or a fellow person, it's a fundamental expression of the self. There are wonderfully democratic and empowering things about an Internet full of anonymous voices. But when those opinions replace our own blundering around for truth, we're in trouble. Too much charting becomes an unnecessary handrail, too many floodlights along the dark path. I give that only two out of five stars.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/st_essay_rating/

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Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique [via longfo

2012-02-09T00:45:00.001-08:00

Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness," he says. "We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we're forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/st_essay_rating/

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Article: മഞ്ഞു ചിറകിലേറി മനാലിയില്‍ | Nalamidam

2012-02-06T22:47:00.000-08:00

മഞ്ഞു ചിറകിലേറി മനാലിയില്‍ | Nalamidam
http://www.nalamidam.com/archives/8730

പണ്ട്, കൈലാസത്തിലേയ്ക്ക് പോകാനൊരുങ്ങുമ്പോള്‍ ആരോ ചോദിച്ചു, ഭയമില്ലേയെന്ന്. ഭയം സന്തതസഹചാരിയാണ്. പക്ഷേ ഭയത്തെ കടിച്ചമര്‍ത്തി, ചെയ്യാനൊരുമ്പെട്ടതെന്തോ അത് ചെയ്യുമ്പോള്‍ ഭയം ആവിയായി പോകുന്നു. നേടിയതിന്റെ ആഹ്ളാദത്തില്‍ ഒരിക്കല്‍കൂടി ഭയത്തെ കീഴ്പ്പെടുത്തുന്നു.

ഓരോ വളവ് തിരിയുമ്പോഴും ഓരോ കല്ലില്‍ തട്ടി ഇടറുമ്പോഴും ഭയം ഉളളിലുണ്ട്; എന്നാല്‍ അത് കര്‍മ്മത്തെ സ്തംഭിപ്പിക്കുന്ന തരത്തിലല്ല; തന്നെക്കുറിച്ചും തന്റെ ചുറ്റുപാടുകളെക്കുറിച്ചും തീവ്രവും മൂര്‍ച്ചയേറിയതുമായ ഒരു ബോധരൂപത്തിലാണ് മനസ്സില്‍ കത്തി നില്‍ക്കുന്നത്. അവിടെ ആശങ്കകളില്ല, പുനര്‍വിചാരങ്ങളുമില്ല. മനസ്സ് ഏകാഗ്രമായി നിലകൊളളുന്നു. ഈ സന്ദര്‍ഭത്തില്‍, സാധിക്കുമെങ്കില്‍ നമ്മെ സ്വയം കാണാന്‍ ശ്രമിക്കണം. നാം പൂര്‍ണ്ണതയിലെത്തുന്ന അപൂര്‍വ്വ നിമിഷങ്ങളാണവ. ഒരു മിന്നലാട്ടം പോലെ അതു മാഞ്ഞു പോകും, നമ്മള്‍ നമ്മെ ശ്രദ്ധിക്കുന്നുവെന്ന് അറിയുമ്പോള്‍. പൂര്‍ണ്ണാകാരത്തിനും പൂര്‍ണ്ണബോധത്തിനും ഇടയിലുളള അറിവിന്റെ ആ മിന്നല്‍പിണരാണ് ആനന്ദത്തിന്റെ ചാര്‍ജിംഗ്. വര്‍ഷത്തില്‍ ഒന്നു മതിയാകും; പിന്നെ, അടുത്ത യാത്ര വരെ …

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Article: ആനന്ദത്തിന്റെ മിന്നല്‍പ്പിണറുകള്‍ | Nalamidam

2012-02-06T22:19:00.000-08:00

ആനന്ദത്തിന്റെ മിന്നല്‍പ്പിണറുകള്‍ | Nalamidam
http://www.nalamidam.com/archives/7866

മൂന്നാമത്തെ ലാര്‍ജ്ജ് ഇറങ്ങിയപ്പോള്‍ ഉള്‍ക്കണ്ണു തുറന്നു. ഈ മഹാപ്രപഞ്ചത്തില്‍ തുലോം നിസ്സാരമായ ഒരു കണികയായ ഞാന്‍ തേടുന്നത് എന്റെ പൂര്‍ണ്ണതയാണ്. എന്റെ അഹംഭാവം എന്നെ പ്രപഞ്ചത്തില്‍ നിന്ന് അടര്‍ത്തിമാറ്റി നിര്‍ത്തിയിരിക്കുന്നു. ആകാശംമുട്ടെ ഉയര്‍ന്നു നില്‍ക്കുന്ന മാമലകളാല്‍ ചുറ്റപ്പെട്ട്, തണുത്തു വിറങ്ങലിച്ച്, പ്രകൃതിയുടെ അവാച്യമായ ആ ഗാംഭീര്യത്താല്‍ എന്നെ മറന്ന് അതെ! അതു തന്നെ! ഓരോ തവണ ഹിമാലയത്തില്‍ പോകുമ്പോഴും അനുഭവിച്ചറിഞ്ഞത് അതു തന്നെ! കൈലാസം ദര്‍ശിച്ചപ്പോഴും ബദരിയില്‍ നീലകണ്ഠന്റെ (നീലകണ്ഠപര്‍വതം) അടുത്തേയ്ക്ക് ഏകനായി നടന്നു ചെന്നപ്പോഴും തുംഗനാഥത്തില്‍ പൂജ ചെയ്തപ്പോഴും ഒരേ സമയം എല്ലാമറിഞ്ഞും ഒന്നുമറിയാതെയും വര്‍ണ്ണനാതീതമായ ഒരു ആനന്ദമൂര്‍ച്ഛയില്‍ വീഴുന്ന ഒരവസ്ഥ. അതു തന്നെയാണ് ഞാന്‍ വീണ്ടും വീണ്ടും കാംക്ഷിക്കുന്നത്. മരണംവരെ വെടിയാന്‍ കഴിയാത്തതും വെടിയണമെന്ന് ആഗ്രഹമില്ലാത്തതുമായ ഒരഡിക്ഷന്‍ ആയിപ്പോയി ഹിമാലയദര്‍ശനം.

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travel

2012-02-06T08:09:00.001-08:00

Also, I write better poems on the move and in odd landscapes. Being in unusual places allows me to feel that I have both an authority to speak and something to say. I can imagine myself as having a frank, fierce encounter with what's real, even if this has nothing to do with the external world. It is easier to believe the poems are necessary.
Others before me have done the same double work, including James Fenton and Ryszard Kapuscinski, to name the two best. In both, a rage crops up in the poems that is fed by the reportage.

We talk about survivor's guilt, but not about observer's guilt. For journalists this is particularly acute, as we are paid to watch suffering and paid more during war. For poets, it's even worse. It's Adorno for the twenty-first century. The incomparable horror of Auschwitz has given way to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Article: Climate Change and the End of Australia [longform.org]

2012-02-05T06:31:00.000-08:00

Climate Change and the End of Australia [longform.org]
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003?print=true

I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere. "Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."

As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.

(via Instapaper)

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the sad transition

2012-02-03T11:18:00.001-08:00

I love working with children. They are smarter than adults. The dynamics they create between themselves and the politics that plays out between them is endlessly fascinating. They are innocent and clever and both these qualities are very endearing. As we grow older, we lose both these traits. We become stupid and corrupt.

1

2012-02-01T13:06:00.001-08:00

1st success

gu ten

2012-01-31T00:44:00.001-08:00

The book world has always been changing! When

Gutenberg ﬁrst started printing books there was an

uproar about the poor scribes who would be losing

their jobs and nobody then thought masses of people

would learn to read. Everybody now is talking about

digital editions and ebooks but a lot of people will

always prefer to have a real book in their hands and

to give as gifts. I try to refrain from looking back at

the good ole days and even when I do, I am not

convinced there was ever a time better than now. A

2012-01-29T13:32:00.001-08:00

How will the U.S. presidential election shape America's foreign policy?

There are three areas where politics will most obviously impinge on policy. The first is China. The United States has a long history in which the party out of power—whether Democratic or Republican—hammers the party in power for being too nice to China.

This year will be no exception. China will undergo a leadership transition of its own. There will be an election in Taiwan, and if the current government there, which has favored rapprochement with Beijing, is replaced, there is a chance that tensions could rapidly rise across the Taiwan Strait, destabilizing the region. Regardless of how this plays out, the U.S. administration will hear loud demands to be tough on China in ways it wouldn't otherwise do. Indeed, President Obama's recent talk of the U.S. "pivot" toward Asia is likely a preemptive move against just such attacks.

The next issue is Israel. President Obama will be under a great deal of pressure to prove that he loves Israel as much as the Republicans, at the same time that Israel's current government is, to be polite, not exactly a constructive force for peace. With the building of settlements continuing and the constant drumbeat in Israel to take action against Iran, this issue could pose a major challenge to the American administration.

The third area that could be a major focus of the campaign is a contest to see who can sound the toughest on Iran. The truth is that the world may ultimately need to live with an Iran that has the capability to make nuclear weapons—a so-called "screwdriver's turn away." If the Iranians are smart, this will be their goal.

The biggest threat from an Iranian nuclear weapon is not that Iran's rulers are lunatics who will start a nuclear war, but that it will set off a nuclear arms race in one of the most dangerous regions in the world and where governments have the money to pay for it.

It is enormously important that the United States does all that it can to prevent this from happening. The Obama administration has tried hard without success. The president's outstretched hand was spurned by Tehran. However, sanctions are having an effect and diplomacy to get Russia and China to cooperate in this respect is plodding ahead. We can't forget, however, that if the Assad regime falls in Syria, Iran will lose its most important ally. Governments that are weakened abroad often make moves at home to prove their mettle and distract their people from the loss.

Will China's leadership transition affect its global outlook? What does it mean for the balance of power in Asia?

While this is a generational change of leadership in China, we are most likely to see continuity of policy. But there are still many questions about China even under its current leaders.

Particularly, there is uncertainty over how aggressive and nationalistic China will be in asserting its territorial claims, most notably in the South China Sea. China took aggressive steps in 2010 but seemed to recognize the lack of wisdom in those actions and backed off significantly this year. Beijing will also have to manage the leadership transition in North Korea, which is always a time when that insecure, dangerous country is most difficult to deal with.

At the same time, China faces economic questions of its own. Beijing will need to boost household spending, but this poses all kinds of strains at home for a new generation of leaders. While China will wrestle with the resulting problems and economic growth will slow significantly, I don't see this as likely to become a crisis.

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Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library [via longf

2012-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

But the truth is that, while The Drama of the Gifted Child was highly regarded at that time, there is something essential missing from it. Miller believes that it is so harmful for mothers to want their kids to "perform" and whatnot, that they're stealing their childhoods from them, not letting them feel their feelings; okay, yes, at one extreme there's the controlling mother, the Vinegar Mother, the Tiger Mother, who really literally won't let the kid feel his feelings ever. But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-worshipping monster who believes that her child's every Feeling is somehow Sacred—to which you're all, hoy, lady, your kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to be happy or well-adjusted adults, either. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad.) It's crazy hard, too, because when you're a parent every single minute of childrearing practically requires compromise of some kind, in order to manage the requirements for a child's being socially adept and well-mannered, but not repressed or bullied or overly controlled. If you indulge a child too much, "respect his feelings" too much, then you become one of those doormats who lives in a nightmare where the child is a tyrant over the house, and if you discipline him too much, he will feel sad, lonely and unloved.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

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Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library [via longf

2012-01-29T09:21:00.001-08:00

This is another book that made a big splash when it appeared; Wallace's copy is an eighteenth printing, from 1993. The thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child is that particularly high-achieving children are damaged because their mothers did not allow them to be themselves, but instead through their own insecurities gave their children the impression that only achievement could win them love. That any deviation from right behavior was unlovable, that they would be rejected unless they performed well. So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly. "Narcissistically disturbed" is her phrase of choice for this condition. Because the child doesn't feel free to own his feelings candidly, but instead must censor and control himself ceaselessly and let only the good things about himself become manifest, all the bad feelings like jealousy, rage, envy, are driven underground and fester there and make the child secretly, existentially miserable, and in a special way, "divided" in rather the way R.D. Laing describes in The Divided Self. Miller's gifted child splits into two: one is the grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and "good" child, and the other a depressed child who never was loved, never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably lost to himself. Pink highlighter indicates underlining or brackets in the text of his books; in green are the notes written in his own hand.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

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Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library [via longf

2012-01-29T09:09:00.001-08:00

"Say, Dave, how'd y'get t'be so dang smart?" "I did the reading."

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

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David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Dave Eggers [via longform.org]

2012-01-29T08:57:00.001-08:00

DFW: Probably the quickest, most efficient way to respond is to say that this question leads nicely into the whole reason why pop-tech books might have some kind of special utility in today's culture. The big difference is that things are vastly more compartmentalized now than they were up through, say, the Renaissance. And more specialized, and more freighted with all kinds of special context. There's no way we'd expect a world-class, cutting-edge mathematician now also to be doing world-class, cutting-edge philosophy, theology, etc. Not so for the Greeks—if only because math, philosophy, and theology weren't coherently distinguishable for them. Same for the Neoplatonists and Scholastics, and etc. etc. (This is a very, very simple answer, of course, maybe right on the edge of simplistic.) By the time Cantor weighed in on ∞ in the 1870s, it was part of an extremely specialized technical discipline that took decades to master and be able to do advanced work in. For Cantor and R. Dedekind (and now this is all just condensed way down from the book (sort of the same way the question is)), the math of ∞ is derived as a way to solve certain thorny problems in post-calc analysis (viz., the expansions of trig functions and the rigorous definition of irrational numbers, respectively), which problems themselves derive from K. Weierstrass's solutions to certain earlier problems, and so on. It's all so abstract and specialized that large parts of E&M end up getting devoted to unpacking the problems clearly enough so that a general reader can get a halfway realistic idea of where set theory and the topology of the Real Line even come from, mathematically speaking. The real point, I think, has to do with something else that ends up mentioned only quickly in the book's final draft. We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. Where even people in two closely related sub-sub-specialties have a hard time communicating with each other because their respective s-s-s's require so much special training and knowledge. And so on. Which is one reason why pop-technical writing might have value (beyond just a regular book-market $-value), as part of the larger frontier of clear, lucid, unpatronizing technical communication. It might be that one of the really significant problems of today's culture involves finding ways for educated people to talk meaningfully with one another across the divides of radical specialization. That sounds a bit gooey, but I think there's some truth to it. And it's not just the polymer chemist talking to the semiotician, but people with special expertise acquiring the ability to talk meaningfully to us, meaning ordinary schmoes. Practical examples: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she's doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you're like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they're rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that's not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There's not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius—which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one's area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.… Anyway, that's the sort of stuff I think your question is nibbling at the edges of, and it's interesting as hell.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

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David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Dave Eggers [via longform.org]

2012-01-29T05:17:00.001-08:00

The point being that I mostly work at home now, although I know I'd work better, faster, more concentratedly if I went someplace else. If work is going shitty, I try to make sure that at least a couple hours in the morning are carved out for this disciplined thing called Work. If it's going well, I often work in the p.m. too, although of course if it's going well it doesn't feel disciplined or like uppercase Work because it's what I want to be doing anyway. What often happens is that when work goes well all my routines and disciplines go out the window simply because I don't need them, and then when it starts not going well I flounder around trying to reconstruct disciplines I can enforce and habits I can stick to. Which is part of what I meant by saying that my way of doing it seems chaotic, at least compared to the writing processes of other people I know about (which now includes you

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

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David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Dave Eggers [via longform.org]

2012-01-29T05:13:00.001-08:00

DFW: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it's supposed to be about. Meaning it's become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody's pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O'Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left's been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it's totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken's broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham's latest Harper's columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It's all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There's no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or "dialogue"); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one's own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything's relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O'Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country's macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy's outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you're in conflict with is an asshole—but it's childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community. My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it's like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that's having the problems ours is. Failing that, maybe at least we can help elevate some professional political journalists who are (1) polite, and (2) willing to entertain the possibility that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree, and (3) able to countenance the fact that some problems are simply beyond the ability of a single ideology to represent accurately. Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray, etc.; and in my own present case this is impossible (and so I am a hypocrite, an ideological opponent could say). In doing the McCain piece you mentioned, I saw some stuff (more accurately: I believe that I saw some stuff) about our current president, his inner circle, and the primary campaign they ran that prompted certain reactions inside me that make it impossible to rise above the fray. I am, at present, partisan. Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can't seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration. Writing-wise, I think this kind of interior state is dangerous. It is when one feels most strongly, most personally, that it's most tempting to speak up ("speak out" is the current verb phrase of choice, rhetorically freighted as it is). But it's also when it's the least productive, or at any rate it seems that way to me—there are plenty of writers and journalists "speaking out" and writing pieces about oligarchy and neofascism and mendacity and appalling short-sightedness in definitions of "national security" and "national interest," etc., and very few of these writers seem to me to be generating helpful or powerful pieces, or really even being persuasive to anyone who doesn't already share the writer's views.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

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David Foster Wallace Interviewed by Dave Eggers [via longform.org]

2012-01-29T05:08:00.001-08:00

Actually, I don't understand the whole concept of form and forms very well, nor the various ways different forms and genres get distinguished and classified. Nor do I much care, really. My basic MO is that I tend to start and/or work on a whole lot of different things at the same time, and at a certain point they either come alive (to me) or they don't. Well over half of them do not, and I lack the discipline/fortitude to work for very long on something that feels dead, so they get abandoned, or put in a trunk, or stripped for parts for other things. It's all rather chaotic, or feels that way to me. What anybody else ever gets to see of mine, writing-wise, is the product of a kind of Darwinian struggle in which only things that are emphatically alive to me are worth finishing, fixing, editing, copyediting, page-proof-tinkering, etc.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

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Re: boorshuavalkkaranam

2012-01-28T11:14:00.001-08:00

Balachandran Chullikkad ചെറുപ്പത്തിൽ അപ്രായോഗിക രാഷ്ട്രീയത്തിൽ വളരെ ഉയർന്നുപോയതു കൊണ്ടാവാം ഇപ്പോൾ ഞങ്ങളൊക്കെ പ്രായോഗികരാഷ്ട്രീയത്തിലേക്കു താഴുന്നത്. എന്തായാലും പ്രായോഗികമല്ലാത്ത രാഷ്ട്രീയത്തിന്‍റെ കൂടെ ഇനി ഞാനില്ല.

boorshuavalkkaranam

2012-01-28T11:13:00.001-08:00

Balachandran Chullikkad ഞങ്ങളൊക്കെ എന്തെങ്കിലും വിപ്ലവപ്രവർത്തനം നടത്തിയതായി ഞങ്ങൾ അവകാശപ്പെടുന്നതിൽ യാതൊരർത്ഥവും ഇല്ല. വിവരാവകാശനിയമപ്രകാരം പോലീസ് വകുപ്പിൽ അന്വേഷിച്ചാൽ ഞങ്ങൾ വിപ്ലവപ്രവർത്തനം നടത്തിയിട്ടുണ്ടോ? ഉണ്ടെങ്കിൽ എന്തു വിപ്ലവപ്രവർത്തനമാണു നടത്തിയത്? തുടങ്ങിയ കാര്യങ്ങൾ അറിയാൻ കഴിയും.

Balachandran Chullikkad ഇടതുപക്ഷ ജനാധിപത്യ മുന്നണിയെ പിന്തുണയ്ക്കുന്നത് ശരിയാണെന്നോ തെറ്റാണെന്നോ എന്താണു വിമർശകർ പറയുന്നത് എന്നു വ്യക്തമാകുന്നില്ല. ശരിയല്ല എന്നാണെങ്കിൽ, മറ്റാരെയാണു പിന്തുണയ്ക്കേണ്ടതെന്നു വ്യക്തമായി പറയൂ. അല്ലെങ്കിൽ മറ്റെന്താണു ചെയ്യേണ്ടതെന്നു വ്യക്തമായി പറയൂ. വിമർശകർ ആരെയാണു പിന്തുണയ്ക്കുന്നതെന്നും ആർക്കാണു വോട്ടു ചെയ്യുന്നതെന്നും വ്യക്തമാക്കൂ സി.പി.എമ്മിന്‍റേയും സി.പി.ഐ.യുടേയും കുഴപ്പങ്ങളും തെറ്റുകളും പോരായ്മകളും മനസ്സിലായി. പകരം മറ്റാരെ പിന്തുണയ്ക്കണം എന്നു പറയൂ. മറ്റെന്തുചെയ്യണം എന്നു പറയൂ.

mittten

2012-01-28T01:39:00.001-08:00

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney's character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He's persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney's salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Where did this persistence come from? It's plausible to think that it came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them.

Article: Schlep Blindness

2012-01-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

Schlep Blindness
http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

The phenomenon isn't limited to startups. Most people don't consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved.

The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

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ko duck

2012-01-23T01:26:00.001-08:00

Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives "suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it," says Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, who has advised the firm. Working in a one-company town did not help, either. Kodak's bosses in Rochester seldom heard much criticism of the firm, she says. Even when Kodak decided to diversify, it took years to make its first acquisition. It created a widely admired venture-capital arm, but never made big enough bets to create breakthroughs, says Ms Kanter.

on banning d MFA

2012-01-22T10:26:00.001-08:00

The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted--no, machine-tooled--to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices--the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany--arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class.

Why I Blog [via longform.org]

2012-01-21T17:30:00.001-08:00

blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don't do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2008/11/why-i-blog/7060/

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Article: Fighting + Otherwise, Part 4 | The Classical

2012-01-16T14:14:00.001-08:00

Fighting + Otherwise, Part 4 | The Classical
http://theclassical.org/articles/fighting-otherwise-part-4

There's a girl with us too, Cerie, a Midwesterner whom I met on my first day; she's been teaching in English in Korea, like a lot of people here. When I first talked to her, she seemed a little overwhelmed and asked a lot of questions, but since then she's come to understand her prestigious position as one of the few women at a Muay Thai camp, and grown accordingly more haughty towards me.

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Article: Fighting + Otherwise: Part III [longform.org]

2012-01-16T14:05:00.001-08:00

Fighting + Otherwise: Part III [longform.org]
http://theclassical.org/articles/fighting-otherwise-part-3#node-198

In boxing, like most one-on-one sports, even a relatively small disparity between opponents can make real competition untenable. There's things to learn from sparring someone who's much better than you, but it's fucking exhausting as well, especially in long stretches like these. When I fall for every feint, and everything I try is disdainfully parried or else pulls me into some painful and compromised new position, a learned helplessness will set in at some point, and then I'm just marking time. And worse is that underneath it all I'm aware of what he's holding back, his capabilities, like a dog on a tether, and I feel sheepish about that being necessary, because he's come across the world for this, just like me. And also I know that it'll come untethered at some point, inevitably, if just for a second, and he'll throw me to the ground, hard, or kick me in the solar plexus, and I won't begrudge him that, at least in retrospect, because I've been on the other side of it, and I know how at some point it just becomes irresistible, like finally scratching an itch. But it still stresses me out, and training is stressful enough at the best of times. So far every class here has ultimately felt worthwhile, but I don't like the everyday uncertainty. I'm worried I'll get hurt eventually; I spend my whole first week training through the bruised ribs I got back in Bangkok, so the essential frailty of my body feels close to the surface.

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Loneliness

2012-01-16T13:59:00.001-08:00

Fighting + Otherwise: Part III [longform.org]
http://theclassical.org/articles/fighting-otherwise-part-3#node-198

I don't blend in so well among the tourists here, on the beach in particular. I'm gaunt and pale, and I'm bearded—having no mirror to shave by for the first five days—and the veins in my arms and neck have started standing out to where I can see them reflected in shop windows from the across the street. More than that, though, I'm by myself; there are plenty of couples here, and families, and here and there a pair of women on their own, and loads of groups of men; there are very few solitary males, and fewer young ones, and they attract attention. Most places, a man on his own could just be written off as lonely, but Lamai wants to attend to your loneliness the same way it would your hunger, or your need for sandals; and if you persist in being alone, it's for your own reasons. Which isn't to say that the families and the couples look fondly on the pudgy Englishman shuffling alongside a nineteen-year old Thai girl, making monosyllabic attempts at conversation, or none at all, but they can understand him at a glance. I don't have any signifiers of somebody on vacation, at least to them, and as such maybe I'm a potential disruption; I doubt anyone thinks all this through consciously, but I suspect they intuit something like it. Or maybe they've just noticed me judging their bodies and their tans and their bad tattoos. Anyway, all this is before I pick up a deep bruise under my left eye and a nasty scrape on the left side of my nose. I feel disreputable, more so than at any point in my adult life, which is tiring: smiles go unreciprocated; chairs that I try to sit in are claimed occupied, though ten minutes later they're still empty. Loneliness in the midst of perfect weather and fun can create an echo chamber, where the disparity between the world within you and without grows greater and greater and more toxic. I should mention, though, that amongst Thais my fucked-up face has the opposite effect, at least when coupled with a pair of boxing shorts, which I've been using as swim trunks: someone will point to my shorts, typically, and then to my face, and say "Thai boxing!" And he'll give me a thumbs-up. One night a waiter gives me a free dish of ice cream. "Boxing boxing!" he says.

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Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation? [via longform.or

2012-01-15T14:14:00.001-08:00

It was hardly the first fishy shipment to pass through Gioia Tauro. Famously, just six weeks after 9/11, workers there heard noises coming from inside a container being transshipped to Nova Scotia via Rotterdam. Inside, police found an Egyptian-born Canadian carrying a Canadian passport, a satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, cameras, maps, and security passes to airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. The container's interior was outfitted with a bed, a water supply, a heater, and a toilet. Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1

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Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation? [via longform.or

2012-01-15T14:08:00.001-08:00

That mix of ubiquity and interchangeability makes the shipping container one of the most radical developments in global commerce since World War II. The first dedicated container ship was built in 1956, and virtually overnight the new logistical approach transformed the cargo business. "In the old days, a whole bunch of guys would stand on the dock, waiting to load cargo onto wooden pallets," says Jim Rice, a supply-chain expert at MIT. "Containers standardized everything. It's like putting Lego blocks together, as opposed to molding things from clay every time." Unloading a pre-container "breakbulk" cargo ship could take a week. Today, a crew of six Genoese longshoremen can move almost two dozen containers per hour using a crane to unload the ship, a stacker to move the boxes, and a few semi trucks; a ship with 3,000 boxes aboard can be turned around in 48 hours. The efficiency has proven to be an irresistible economic force. In 2010, the world's container ports processed the equivalent of 560 million 20-foot containers. If you set aside bulk commodities like crude oil and grain, that's more than 90 percent of the planet's maritime cargo. By driving the cost of shipping way down and the speed of international commerce way up, containers helped make manufacturing global. But those millions of identical containers are, essentially, mystery boxes. Stevedores used to lay hands on each piece of cargo that went into a ship's hold. Today, a container may be loaded, or "stuffed," thousands of miles from the port. Once the doors are closed and sealed, "no one knows what's inside," says Philip Spayd, a supply-chain security consultant who spent 25 years working for the federal government. "We know what's represented on their documents," but those documents are easily faked, he says. "The only people who really know what's inside are the ones who were there when the container was packed." Containerized cargo is used to smuggle every imaginable form of contraband, from narcotics and small arms to counterfeit purses and illegal immigrants.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1

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emer gen see

2012-01-15T11:39:00.001-08:00

The portrait which finally emerged was unflattering. Sanjay was a scary simpleton whose preferred reading matter was Archie comics. He manipulated his mother, sowing inside her a guilt complex about him coping alone with the after-effects of a broken home. The country should be grateful Sanjay's capacity for inflicting havoc was abruptly curtailed.

Article: The Mystery Woman Behind the Murdoch Mess [longform.org]

2012-01-14T15:39:00.001-08:00

The Mystery Woman Behind the Murdoch Mess [longform.org]
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/02/rebekah-brooks-201202.print

Deputy prime minister at the time, Prescott now recalls how "Rebekah Wade used to have dinner with Blair and Brown and play them off against each other." He is still shocked at how easy it was. "If Blair wanted to know what Brown was doing, she'd fix the dinner up and then tell him," he recalls. "They used to use her for intelligence on the other." It was artful, he says, the way she made each man think that she was on his side. "I used to say, 'Why are you listening to that bloody woman?' It was all about Murdoch," says Prescott, who is among the politicians who were hacked by the News—in his case, in 2006, following the exposure of an extramarital affair with his secretary.

As she did with Cherie Blair, Wade also became very close to Sarah Brown. It was something people would note—the intimacy of her friendships with the powerful as she befriended their husbands, wives, and children. That was "the nature of how she operates," says Roy Greenslade. "She gets that close to people. It's not simply a business thing—it's a personal thing. It's domestic." But Wade's friendship with the Browns did not stop her, in the fall of 2006, from phoning them with upsetting news. The Sun had discovered from an informant that the Browns' infant son had cystic fibrosis, and the paper was going to run the story the next day. Which it did, on the cover, with the screaming headline chancellor's baby has cystic fibrosis. The Browns, who had already lost a baby daughter and were still coming to terms with the news of their son's illness, were devastated. It is this story—along with the revelation that Gordon Brown's phone may have been hacked by the News of the World and his financial records accessed by Murdoch's Sunday Times—that today particularly horrifies people. "If that doesn't make your skin crawl, the evilness of it, what does?" says a Murdoch observer. It was a measure of Murdoch's political power, and Rebekah Wade's, that Gordon Brown was among the guests at her wedding three years later.

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On leadership

2012-01-14T12:05:00.001-08:00

It is all but impossible to talk about the really important stuff in politics without using terms that have become such awful clichés they make your eyes glaze over and are difficult to even hear. One such term is "leader," which all the big candidates use all the time—as in "providing leadership," "a proven leader," "a new leader for a new century," etc.—and have reduced to such a platitude that it's hard to try to think about what "leader" really means and whether indeed what today's Young Voters want is a leader. The weird thing is that the word "leader" itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn't boring at all; in fact he's the opposite of boring.

Obviously, a real leader isn't just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to believe is a good guy. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with "inspire" being used here in a serious and noncliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can't get ourselves to do on our own. It's a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you "looked up to" (interesting phrase) and wanted to be like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend's parent, or a boss in some summer job. And yes, all these are "authority figures," but it's a special kind of authority. If you've ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren't, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader's true authority is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, how you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you wouldn't be able to if there weren't this person you respected and believed in and wanted to please.

In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. Lincoln was, by all available evidence, a real leader, and Churchill, and Gandhi, and King. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and probably de Gaulle, and certainly Marshall, and maybe Eisenhower. (Although of course Hitler was a real leader too, a very potent one, so you have to watch out; all it is is a weird kind of personal power.)

Probably the last real leader we had as US president was JFK, 40 years ago. It's not that Kennedy was a better human being than the seven presidents we've had since: we know he lied about his WWII record, and had spooky Mob ties, and screwed around more in the White House than poor old Clinton could ever dream of. But JFK had that special leader-type magic, and when he said things like "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," nobody rolled their eyes or saw it as just a clever line. Instead, a lot of them felt inspired. And the decade that followed, however fucked up it was in other ways, saw millions of Young Voters devote themselves to social and political causes that had nothing to do with getting a plum job or owning expensive stuff or finding the best parties; and the 60s were, by most accounts, a generally cleaner and happier time than now.

It is worth considering why. It's worth thinking hard about why, when John McCain says he wants to be president in order to inspire a generation of young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest (which means he's saying he wants to be a real leader), a great many of those young Americans will yawn or roll their eyes or make some ironic joke instead of feeling inspired the way they did with Kennedy. True, JFK's audience was in some ways more innocent than we are: Vietnam hadn't happened yet, or Watergate, or the S&L scandals, etc. But there's also something else. The science of sales and marketing was still in its drooling infancy in 1961 when Kennedy was saying "Ask not …" The young people he inspired had not been skillfully marketed to all their lives. They knew nothing of spin. They were not totally, terribly familiar with salesmen.

Now you have to pay close attention to something that's going to seem obvious at first. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. There are also similarities, of course. A great salesman is usually charismatic and likable, and he can often get us to do things (buy things, agree to things) that we might not go for on our own, and to feel good about it. Plus a lot of salesmen are basically decent people with plenty about them to admire. But even a truly great salesman isn't a leader. This is because a salesman's ultimate, overriding motivation is self-interest—if you buy what he's selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying is in your interests (and it really might be)—still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman's ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful … although admittedly it's a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you're subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself.

Some people believe that President Ronald W. Reagan (1981-89) was our last real leader. But not many of them are Young Voters. Even in the 80s, most younger Americans, who could smell a marketer a mile away, knew that what Reagan really was was a great salesman. What he was selling was the idea of himself as a leader. And if you're under, say, 35, this is what pretty much every US president you've grown up with has been: a very talented salesman, surrounded by smart, expensive political strategists and media consultants and spinmasters who manage his "campaign" (as in also "advertising campaign") and help him sell us on the idea that it's in our interests to vote for him. But the real interests that drove these guys were their own. They wanted, above all, To Be President, wanted the mind-bending power and prominence, the historical immortality—you could smell it on them. (Young Voters tend to have an especially good sense of smell for this sort of thing.) And this is why these guys weren't real leaders: because it was obvious that their deepest, most elemental motives were selfish, there was no chance of them ever inspiring us to transcend our own selfishness. Instead, they usually helped reinforce our market-conditioned belief that everybody's ultimately out for himself and that life is about selling and profit and that words and phrases like "service" and "justice" and "community" and "patriotism" and "duty" and "Give government back to the people" and "I feel your pain" and "Compassionate Conservatism" are just the politics industry's proven sales pitches, exactly the same way "Anti-Tartar" and "Fresher Breath" are the toothpaste industry's pitches. We may vote for them, the same way we may go buy toothpaste. But we're not inspired. They're not the real thing.

It's not just a matter of lying or not lying, either. Everyone knows that the best marketing uses the truth—i.e., sometimes a brand of toothpaste really is better. That's not the point. The point, leader-wise, is the difference between merely believing somebody and believing in him.

Granted, this is a bit simplistic. All politicians sell, always have. FDR and JFK and MLK and Gandhi were great salesmen. But that's not all they were. People could smell it. That weird little extra something. It had to do with "character" (which, yes, is also a cliché—suck it up).

Re: John Mc

2012-01-14T11:53:00.001-08:00

Maybe they really can coexist—humanity and politics, shrewdness and decency. But it gets complicated. In the Spartanburg Q&A, after two China questions and one on taxing Internet commerce, as most of the lobby's pencils are still at the glass making fun of the local heads, a totally demographically average 30-

something middle-class soccer mom in rust-colored slacks and those round, overlarge glasses totally average 30-something soccer moms always wear gets picked and stands and somebody brings her the mike. It turns out her name is Donna Duren, of right here in Spartanburg SC, and she says she has a fourteen-year-old son named Chris, in whom Mr. and Mrs. Duren have been trying to inculcate family values and respect for authority and a noncynical idealism about America and its duly elected leaders. They want him to find heroes he can believe in, she says. Donna Duren's whole story takes a while, but nobody's bored, and even out here on the stanchion's monitors you can sense a change in the THM's theater's voltage, and the national pencils come away from the front's glass and start moving in and elbowing people aside (which they're really good at) to get close to the monitors' screens. Mrs. Duren says that Chris—clearly a sensitive kid—was "made very very upset" by the Lewinsky scandal and the R-rated revelations and the appalling behavior of Clinton and Starr and Tripp and pretty much everybody on all sides during the impeachment thing, and Chris had a lot of very upsetting and uncomfortable questions that Mr. and Mrs. D. struggled to answer, and that basically it was a really hard time but they got through it. And then last year, at more or less a trough in terms of idealism and respect for elected authority, she says, Chris had discovered John McCain and McCain2000.com, and got interested in the campaign, and the parents had apparently read him some G-rated parts of McCain's Faith of My Fathers, and the upshot is that young Chris finally found a public hero he could believe in: John S. McCain III. It's impossible to know what McCain's face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN's feed and Randy van R. of CNN is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she's average and just wants a decent, noncynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like "family values" and "hero" without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching some wholesome nonviolent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who'd vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, distraught in a totally average and moving parental way, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wants to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they're stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.

At which point (0853h) two things happen out here in the Fine Arts Center lobby. The first is that the national pencils disperse in a radial pattern, each dialing his cell phone, and the network field producers all come barreling through the theater doors pulling their cell phone antennas out with their teeth, and everybody tries to find a little empty area to Waltz in while they call the gist of this riveting Negativity-related development in to networks and editors and try to raise their counterparts in the Bush2000 press corps to see if they can get a React from the Shrub on Mrs. Duren's story, at the end of which story the second thing happens, which is that CNN's Randy van R. finally pans to McCain and you can see McCain's facial expression, which is pained and pale and looks actually more distraught even than Mrs. Duren's face had looked. And what McCain does, after staring down at the floor for a few seconds, is … apologize. He doesn't lash out at Bush₂ or at push-polling or appear to try to capitalize politically in any way. He looks sad and compassionate and regretful and says that the only reason he got into this race in the first place was to try to help inspire young Americans to feel better about devoting themselves to something, and that a story like what Mrs. Duren took the trouble to come down here to the THM this morning and tell him is just about the worst thing he could hear, and that if it's OK with Mrs. D. he'd like to call her son—he asks his name again, and Randy van R. pans smoothly back to Donna Duren as she says "Chris" and then pans smoothly back to McCain—Chris and apologize personally on the phone and tell Chris that yes there are unfortunately some bad people out there and he's sorry Chris had to hear stuff like what he heard but that it's never a mistake to believe in something, that politics is still worthwhile as a process to get involved in, and he really does look upset, McCain does, and almost as what seems like an afterthought he says that maybe one thing Donna Duren and other concerned parents and citizens can do is call the Bush2000 campaign and tell them to stop this push-polling, that Governor Bush is a good man with a family of his own and it's difficult to believe he'd ever endorse his campaign doing things like this if he knew about it, and that he (McCain) will be calling Governor Bush again personally for the umpteenth time to ask him to stop the Negativity, and McCain's eyes now actually look wet, as in teary, which maybe is just a trick of the TV lights but is nevertheless disturbing, the whole thing is disturbing, because McCain seems upset in a way that's a little too … well, almost dramatic. He takes a couple more THM questions, then stops abruptly and says he's sorry but he's just so upset about the Chris Duren Incident that he's having a hard time concentrating, and he asks the THM crowd's forgiveness, and thanks them, and forgets his message-discipline and doesn't finish with he'll always. Tell them. The truth, but they applaud like mad anyway, and the four-faced column's monitors' feed is cut as Randy and Jim C. et al. go shoulder-held to join the scrum as McCain starts to exit.

Re: John Mc

2012-01-14T11:48:00.001-08:00

Among the techs and non-simian pencils, the feeling is that McCain's single finest human moment of the campaign so far was at the Warren MI Town Hall Meeting on Monday, in the Q&A, when a middle-aged man in a sportcoat and beret, a man who didn't look in any way unusual but turned out to be insane—meaning literally, as in DSM IV-grade schizophrenic—came to the mike and said that the government of Michigan has a mind-control machine and influences brainwaves and that not even wrapping roll after roll of aluminum foil around your head with only the tiniest pinpricks for eyes and breathing stopped them from influencing brainwaves, and he says he wants to know whether if McCain is president he will use Michigan's mind-control machine to catch the murderers and pardon the Congress and compensate him personally for 60 long years of government mind control, and can he get it in writing. The question is not funny; the room's silence is the mortified kind. Think how easy it would have been for a candidate here to blanch or stumble, or to have hard-eyed aides remove the man, or (worst) to make fun of the guy in order to defuse everyone's horror and embarrassment and try to score humor points with the crowd, at which most of the younger pencils would probably have fainted dead away from cynical disgust because the poor guy is still standing there at the mike and looking earnestly up at McCain, awaiting an answer. Which McCain, incredibly, sees—the man's humanity, the seriousness of these issues to him—and says yes, he will, he'll promise to look into it, and yes he'll put this promise in writing, although he "believe[s] [they] have a difference of opinion about this mind-control machine," and in sum he defuses the insane man and treats him respectfully without patronizing him or pretending to be schizophrenic too, and does it all so quickly and gracefully and with such basic decency that if it was some sort of act then McCain is the very devil himself. Which the techs, later, after the post-THM Press-Avail and scrum, degearing aboard the ghastly Pimpmobile, say McCain is not (the devil) and that they were, to a man, moved by the unfakable humanity of the exchange, and yet at the same time also impressed with McCain's professionalism in disarming the guy, and Jim C. urgesRolling Stone not to be so cynical as to reject out of hand the possibility that the two can coexist—human genuineness and political professionalism—because it's the great yin-and-yang paradox of the McCain2000 campaign, and is so much more interesting than the sort of robotic unhuman all-pro campaign he's used to that Jim says he almost doesn't mind the grind this time.

Re: John Mc

2012-01-14T11:46:00.001-08:00

But then the doubts again dissolve when McCain starts taking questions at THMs, which by now is what's under way in Spartanburg. McCain always starts this part by telling the crowd that he invites "questions, comments, and the occasional insult from any US Marines who might be here today" (which, again, gets radically less funny with repetition [apparently the Navy and Marines tend not to like each other]). The questions always run the great vox-populi gamut, from Talmudically bearded guys asking about Chechnya and tort reform to high-school kids reading questions off printed sheets their hands shake as they hold, from moms worried about their babies' future SSI to ancient vets in Legion caps who call McCain "Lieutenant" and want to trade salutes, plus the obligatory walleyed fundamentalists trying to pin him down on whether Christ really called homosexuality an abomination (w/ McCain, to his credit, pointing out that they don't even have the right Testament), and arcane questions about index-fund regulation and postal privatization, and HMO horror stories, and Internet porn, and tobacco litigation, and people who believe the Second Amendment entitles them to own grenade launchers. The questions are random and unscreened, and the candidate fields them all, and he's never better or more human than in these exchanges, especially when the questioner is angry or wacko—McCain will say "I respectfully disagree" or "We have a difference of opinion" and then detail his objections in lucid English with a gentleness that's never condescending. For a man with a temper and a reputation for suffering fools ungladly, McCain is unbelievably patient and decent with people at THMs, especially when you consider that he's 63, sleep-deprived, in chronic pain, and under enormous pressure not to gaffe or get himself in trouble. He doesn't. No matter how stale and message-disciplined the 22.5 at the beginning, in the Town Hall Q&As you get an overwhelming sense that this is a decent, honorable man trying to tell the truth to people he really sees. You will not be alone in this impression.

Re: John Mc

2012-01-14T11:44:00.001-08:00

In fairness to McCain, he's not an orator and doesn't pretend to be. His real métier is conversation, a back-and-forth. This is because he's bright in a fast, flexible way that most other candidates aren't. He also genuinely seems to find people and questions and arguments energizing—the latter maybe because of all his years debating in Congress—which is why he favors Town Hall Q&As and constant chats with press in his rolling salon. So, while the media marvel at his accessibility because they've been trained to equate it with vulnerability, they don't seem to realize they're playing totally to McCain's strength when they converse with him instead of listening to his speeches. In conversation he's smart and alive and human and seems actually to listen and respond directly to you instead of to some demographic abstraction you might represent. It's his speeches and 22.5s that are canned and stilted, and also sometimes scary and right-wingish, and when you listen closely to these it's as if some warm pleasant fog suddenly lifts and it strikes you that you're not at all sure it's John McCain you want choosing the head of the EPA or the at least two new justices who'll probably be coming onto the Supreme Court in the next term, and you start wondering all over again what makes the guy so attractive.

Re: John Mc

2012-01-14T11:19:00.001-08:00

But then look at the photos of McCain's own face that night. He's the only one not smiling. Why? Can you guess? It's because now he might possibly win. At the start, on PBS and C-SPAN, in his shitty little campaign van with just his wife and a couple aides, he was running about 3 percent in the polls. And it's easy (or at least comparatively easy) to tell the truth when there's nothing to lose. New Hampshire changed everything. The 7 Feb. issues of all three big newsmagazines have good shots of McCain's face right at the moment the NH results are being announced. It's worth looking hard at his eyes in these photos. Now there's something to lose, or to win. Now it gets complicated, the campaign and the chances and the strategy; and complication is dangerous, because the truth is rarely complicated. Complication usually has more to do with mixed motives, gray areas, compromise. On the news, the first ominous rumble of this new complication was McCain's bobbing and weaving around questions about South Carolina's Confederate flag. That was a couple days ago. Now everybody's watching. Don't think the Trail's press have nothing at stake in this. There are two big questions about McCain now, today, as everyone starts the two-week slog through SC. The easy question, the one all the pencils and heads spend their time on, is whether he'll win. The other—the one posed by those photos' eyes—is hard to even put into words.

John Mc

2012-01-14T11:15:00.001-08:00

One reason a lot of the media on the Trail like John McCain is simply that he's a cool guy. Nondweeby. In school, Clinton was in student government and band, whereas McCain was a varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates, a guy who graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis and got in trouble for flying jets too low and cutting power lines and crashing all the time and generally being cool. At 63, he's witty, and smart, and he'll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he'll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don't ever mind because it's the sort of shit that makes you feel that here's this very cool, important guy who's noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit. Sometimes he'll wink at you for no reason. If all that doesn't sound like a big deal, you have to remember that these pro reporters have to spend a lot of time around politicians, and most politicians are painful to be around. As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, "If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you'd be way more impressed with [McCain]. It's that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act." And the grateful press on the Trail transmit—maybe even exaggerate—McCain's humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems so paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the men who want to "lead" and "inspire" them.

HRW

2012-01-14T11:12:00.001-08:00

''The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one" – Oscar Wilde.

writing

2012-01-14T04:51:00.001-08:00

മറ്റുള്ളവര്‍ പറയുന്നത് മുഴുവന്‍ കേള്‍ക്കാതിരിക്കുക, ആരോടെന്നില്ലാതെ ശുണ്ഠി വരുക, വിശപ്പ് നഷ്ടപ്പെടുക എന്ന ചില്ലറ അസ്ക്യതകളൊക്കെ എനിക്കുമുണ്ടാവാറുണ്ട്. എന്നാലും പണ്ടൊരിക്കല്‍ മലയാറ്റൂര്‍ രാമകൃഷ്ണന്‍ ടി. എന്‍. ജയചന്ദ്രനോടു പറഞ്ഞതുപോലെത്തന്നെയാണ് എന്‍െറയും അനുഭവം. എഴുതിയില്ളെങ്കില്‍ മരിച്ചുപോവും എന്നൊന്നും എനിക്കും തോന്നിയിട്ടില്ല.
എഴുതിക്കഴിഞ്ഞതിനുശേഷമുള്ള മനസ്സ് അങ്ങേയറ്റം തെളിഞ്ഞതാവും. ഏതു തെറ്റിനും മാപ്പുകൊടുക്കാന്‍ സജ്ജമാണ് അപ്പോഴത്. ചെറിയ ഒരു ദൈവമായി മാറും അപ്പോഴൊക്കെ ഞാന്‍. 'സൃഷ്ടിശേഷമായ ഒൗദാര്യം' എന്ന് ഒരു കഥയില്‍ പറഞ്ഞിട്ടുണ്ട്. അത് ഏത് എഴുത്തുകാരനും അനുഭവിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ടാവും എന്നാണ് എന്‍െറ വിശ്വാസം. അല്ളെങ്കില്‍, അല്‍പനായ എഴുത്തുകാരന്‍ ചിലപ്പോഴെങ്കിലും നല്ല മനുഷ്യനായിത്തീരുന്നുണ്ട് എന്ന് ആശ്വസിക്കട്ടെ. ഒരുപക്ഷേ, എഴുത്തിന്‍െറ ഏറ്റവും നല്ല വശവും അതുതന്നെയായിരിക്കണം. പക്ഷേ, എഴുതിക്കഴിഞ്ഞതില്‍ അത്രയേറെ തൃപ്തിയുണ്ടെങ്കിലേ അതനുഭവിക്കാനാവൂ. ആ മനസ്സലിവ് അധികനേരം നീണ്ടുനില്‍ക്കുകയുമില്ല. ഏറിയാല്‍ രണ്ടു ദിവസം.

The Business Case for Reading Novels

2012-01-11T13:58:00.001-08:00

But nourishing empathy doesn't require such grimness. And if you want your diet of fiction, as it's shaping your mind to be more emotionally acute, to be specifically relevant to work, there is a body of great literature about business and organizational behavior. For instance, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, inspired by 19th century financial scandals among the British elite, resonates powerfully today. In his autobiography, Trollope wrote that "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now." Seems fairly au courant to me.

From now on, I'm going to feel less like an escapist slacker when I'm engrossed in a new novel. In addition to the Trollope, below are some of my favorite books to get you started.

Kurt Andersen, Turn of the Century — set in 2000 and 2001, a successful TV producer husband and digital entrepreneur wife, trying to balance the demands of work and life, wind up pitted against each other as executives in a U.S. media empire. His mistrust grows when she becomes a favorite of the Rupert Murdoch-like chairman. Meanwhile, their hedge-fund-manager best friend is involved in big-time stock manipulation. (Full disclosure: my husband is the author)
Jane Austen, Sandition — in this unfinished fragment of a novel, Austen departs from her typical marriage plot to describe the zealous entrepreneurialism of a real estate speculator. While we can never know how the novel would have ended, we can be pretty sure his housing bubble will burst.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House — Dickens' tenth novel explores the human cost of prolonged litigation through the eyes of Esther Summerson, who is caught up in a multi-generational dispute over the disposition over an inheritance. Anyone who has ever been entangled in a lawsuit will revel in the characterization of the process. At the time of publication, 1852–1853, public outrage over injustice in the English legal system helped the novel to spark legal reform that culminated in the 1870s.
William Gaddis, JR — in the 1976 National Book Award winner, the 11-year old protagonist, JR, secretly trades penny stocks, using the tools of the trade at the time — money orders and payphones — to build a fortune. Written entirely in dialogue, the absurdity of a precocious child's feat satirizes as Gaddis put it, "the American dream turned inside out." His description of dysfunctional boards and the corrosive effect of corporate takeovers and asset stripping are as current today as they were 30 years ago.
Joseph Heller, Something Happened — Heller's stream of consciousness second novel follows a regular-joe middle manager as he prepares for a promotion. The messy interweaving of his thoughts about his job, family, sex, and childhood perfectly distill how complicated the selves we bring to work really are.

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The Dark Side of Dubai [via longform.org]

2012-01-10T12:56:00.001-08:00

As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied. Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home – his son, daughter, wife and parents – were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here – and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh. He shows me his room. It is a tiny, poky, concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds, where he lives with 11 other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cellphone. The room stinks, because the lavatories in the corner of the camp – holes in the ground – are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze. The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says. The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat – it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

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le caaare

2012-01-08T11:19:00.001-08:00

November 18, 1997,

John le Carré complains that he has been branded an anti-Semite as a result of a politically correct witch-hunt and declares himself innocent of the charge. It would be easier to sympathize with him had he not been so ready to join in an earlier campaign of vilification against a fellow writer.

In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, le Carré wrote an article (also, if memory serves, inThe Guardian) in which he eagerly, and rather pompously, joined forces with my assailants.

It would be gracious if he were to admit that he understands the nature of the Thought Police a little better now that, at least in his own opinion, he's the one in the line of fire.

Salman Rushdie

Novemer 19, 1997

Rushdie's way with the truth is as self-serving as ever. I never joined his assailants. Nor did I take the easy path of proclaiming him to be a shining innocent. My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.

I wrote that there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society. I wrote that tolerance does not come at the same time, and in the same form, to all religions and cultures, and that Christian society too, until very recently, defined the limits of freedom by what was sacred. I wrote, and would write again today, that when it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie's work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie's royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it.

My purpose was not to justify the persecution of Rushdie, which, like any decent person, I deplore, but to sound less arrogant, less colonialist, and less self-righteous note than we were hearing from the safety of his admirers' camp.

John le Carré

November 20, 1997,

I'm grateful to John le Carré for refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be. He claims not to have joined in the attack against me but also states that "there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity."

A cursory examination of this lofty formulation reveals that (1) it takes the philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an "insult," and (2) it suggests that anyone who displeases philistine, reductionist, radical Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety.

So, if John le Carré upsets Jews, all he needs to do is fill a page of The Guardian with his muddled bombast, but if I am accused of thought crimes, John le Carré will demand that I suppress my paperback edition. He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel's publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom.

John le Carré is right to say that free speech isn't absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don't defend. I'd always thought George Smiley knew that. His creator appears to have forgotten.

Salman Rushdie

November 20, 1997

John le Carré's conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head. He used to be evasive and euphemistic about the open solicitation of murder, for bounty, on the grounds that ayatollahs had feelings, too. Now he tells us that his prime concern was the safety of the girls in the mailroom. For good measure, he arbitrarily counterposes their security against Rushdie's royalties.

May we take it, then, that he would have had no objection if The Satanic Verses had been written and published for free and distributed gratis from unattended stalls? This might have at least satisfied those who appear to believe that the defense of free expression should be free of cost and free of risk.

As it happens, no mailroom girls have been injured in the course of eight years' defiance of the fatwah. And when the nervous book chains of North America briefly did withdraw The Satanic Verses on dubious grounds of "security," it was their staff unions who protested and who volunteered to stand next to plate-glass windows in upholding the reader's right to buy and peruse any book. In le Carré's eyes, their brave decision was taken in "safety" and was moreover blasphemous towards a great religion! Could we not have been spared this revelation of the contents of his hat - I mean head?

Christopher Hitchens

November 21, 1997

Anyone reading yesterday's letters from Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens might well ask himself into whose hands the great cause of free speech he has fallen. Whether from Rushdie's throne on Hitchens's gutter, the message is the same: "Our cause is absolute, it brooks no dissent or qualification; whoever questions it is by definition an ignorant, pompous, semi-literate unperson."

Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which The Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last? I am amazed that Hitchen's has put up with Rushdie's self-canonization for so long. Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny the fact that he insulted a great religion. Instead he accuses me - note his preposterous language for a change - of taking the philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn't know I was so clever.

What I do know is, Rushdie took on a known enemy and screamed "foul" when it acted in character. The pain he has had to endure is appalling, but it doesn't make a martyr of him, nor - much as he would like it to - does it sweep away all argument about the ambiguities of his participation in his own downfall.

John le Carré

November 22, 1997

If he wants to win an argument, John le Carré could begin by learning how to read. It's true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. "Ignorant" and "semi-literate" are dunces' caps he has skillfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn't dream of removing them. Le Carré's habit of giving himself good reviews ("my thoughtful and well-received speech") was no doubt developed because, well, somebody has to write them. He accuses me of not having done the same for myself. "Rushdie," says the dunce, "does not deny he insulted a great world religion." I have no intention of repeating yet again my many explications of The Satanic Verses, a novel of which I remain extremely proud. A novel, Mr. le Carré, not a gibe. You know what a novel is, don't you, John?

Salman Rushdie

The Hitch

2012-01-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don't Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick, a.k.a. Moby-Cock. And, as the not-quite version of Joseph Heller's comic masterpiece, Hitch-22. Christopher rescued this last title from the slush pile of our catechism of failures and redeemed it by giving it to the text which now stands as his best memorial.

Laughter and Hitchens were inseparable companions, and comedy was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. When we were both on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2009 along with Mos Def, and the rapper began to offer up a series of cockeyed animadversions about Iran's nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Christopher became almost ferally polite, addressing Mos, as he tore into his ideas, by the faux-respectful moniker "Mr. Definitely," a name so belittlingly funny that it rendered even more risible the risible notions which Mr. D. was trying to advance.

Behind the laughter was what his friend Ian McEwan called "his Rolls-Royce mind," that organ of improbable erudition and frequently brilliant, though occasionally flawed, perception. The Hitch mind was indeed a sleek and purring machine trimmed with elegant fittings, but his was not a rarefied sensibility. He was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler, never happier than when engaged in moral or political fisticuffs. When I became involved in a public disagreement with the eminent spy novelist John le Carré, Hitchens leapt unbidden into the fray and ratcheted the insult level up many notches, comparing the great man's conduct to "that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head." The argument, I'm sorry to report, grew uglier after the Hitch's intervention.

He became oddly enamored of Paul Wolfowitz. One night I happened to be at his apartment in D.C. when Wolfowitz, who had just left the administration, stopped by for a late-night drink and proceeded to deliver a critique of the Iraq war (all Rumsfeld's fault, apparently) which left me, at least, speechless. The Wolfowitz doctrine, Wolfowitz was saying, had not been Wolfowitz's idea. Indeed, Wolfowitz had been anti-Wolfowitz-doctrine from the beginning. This was an argument worthy of a character from Catch-22. I wondered how long Christopher would be able to tolerate such bedfellows.

Article: Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]

2012-01-08T09:08:00.001-08:00

Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]
http://bombsite.com/issues/81/articles/2519

JE It's a very serious question. And the male author of a novel about a hermaphrodite couldn't fail to answer it in the affirmative. (Was that diplomatic enough?) My parents had two boys before me. They wanted me to be a girl. They even had a girl's name picked out for me: Michelle. I remember being little and hearing that Beatles song "Michelle" and thinking about the fact that I was supposed to be a girl but wasn't. This was a minor thing; please don't draw too many psychiatric conclusions. Did you know that Hemingway was made to dress like a girl until he was eleven or so? You could say he overcompensated in later life. When I was thirteen or fourteen I was very pretty. It seems amazing now, Jonathan, but that was the case. I'd be hanging out with a bunch of girls and one of their mothers would come out and say, "Would you girls like something to drink?" Bellow says in Humboldt's Gift that being a poet is "a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing." So I'd say that to be a writer you have to have something feminine about you. As these tiresome categories go, anyway. Gender is a continuum and everyone falls in a different spot. There's no other way to think about it, really.

(via Instapaper)

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Article: Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]

2012-01-08T09:05:00.001-08:00

Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]
http://bombsite.com/issues/81/articles/2519

JE I grew up in the unisex '70s. The heyday of nurture. Everyone was convinced that personality, and especially gender-specific behavior, was determined by rearing. Sexologists and feminists insisted that each child was a blank slate and that rearing determined gender roles. Now everything is reversed. Biology and genetics are considered the real determinants of behavior. Having lived through the demise of the first oversimplification, I suspect the imminent demise of the current one. Right now we exaggerate the role of genes in controlling our destiny. As Cal says, the ancient Greek notion of fate has today been carried into our very genes. But that's not the way it works. Genes and environment interact during a specific, crucial developmental period. They coauthor the human being. Biologists understand this, but the culture at large still doesn't, quite. So we have these pat theories about evolutionary causes for our present behaviors. Men can't communicate because 20,000 years ago they had to be silent on the hunt. Women are verbal because they had to call out to each other while gathering nuts and berries. This is just as silly as the previous nurture explanations.

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Article: Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]

2012-01-08T09:02:00.001-08:00

Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides [longform.org]
http://bombsite.com/issues/81/articles/2519

Influence isn't just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery. What you have to do is put all your influences into the blender and arrive at your own style and vision. That's the way it happens in music—you put a sitar in a rock song and you get a new sound. It's hybridization again. Hybrid vigor. It operates in art, too. The idea that a writer is a born genius, endowed with blazing originality, is mostly a myth, I think. You have to work at your originality. You create it; it doesn't create you. If I look at the writers who have influenced me, I see that many things about their lives accord with my own. Take Roth, for instance. He grew up in Newark, a town not so different from Detroit. He was the son of middle-class American parents and the grandson of grandparents with funny accents. From this hardworking but hardly culturally elevated milieu he went on to study English and become a good college boy. Now take Rushdie. He came from exotic origins, Bombay, (exotic to the English, anyway) and went to Cambridge. With both these writers, there is belonging and not belonging. In my own case, I was sent to a private prep school in Grosse Pointe, a place that made me more aware of my supposed "ethnicity" than I had been in public school. This marked me. I think it's no surprise that I might be influenced by a writer like Roth who writes very much about being American but also about being Jewish. I also happen to admire his books.

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mouth shut

2012-01-08T01:19:00.001-08:00

Dozens of pages of denunciations materialised immediately. Much of the moral advice to me would be sensible enough had the statement reflected something I had said. The one I liked best said: "I think Mr. Sen should keep his mouth shut" — an eminently sensible piece of advice given the constant danger of misreporting by a careless press — or, as in this case, a careless news agency on which many papers mechanically rely.

GLUCK

2012-01-04T04:01:00.001-08:00

n the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. "The human world is made of stories, not people," writes the novelist David Mitchell. "The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed." Margaret Atwood writes: "As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere." Nearing death, John Updike reflected on

A life poured into words—apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed.

Article: The Guts of a New Machine [letsgetcritical.org]

2012-01-02T19:46:00.001-08:00

The Guts of a New Machine [letsgetcritical.org]
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?scp=1&sq=%22the+guts+of+a+new+machine%22&st=cse&pagewanted=all

The column also noted that some on Wall Street were waiting to see what would happen to the iPod once Dell came out with its combination of music store and music player. (The Dell DJ is slightly bigger than the iPod but claims a longer battery life, which the company says is what its consumer research indicated people wanted; it costs $250 for a 15-gigabyte version, $300 for 20 gigabytes, or nearly 5,000 songs.) Napster's name has been bought by another company that has launched a pay service with a hardware partner, Samsung. But it was Dell that one investor quoted in the Journal article held out as the rival with the greatest chance of success: "No one markets as well as Dell does." This was causing some eye-rolling in Cupertino; Dell is not a marketer at all. Dell has no aura; there is no Cult of Dell. Dell is a merchandiser, a shiller of gigs-per-dollar. A follower. Dell had not released its product when I met Jobs, but he still dismissed it as "not any good."

About a week later Jobs played host to one of the "launch" events for which the company is notorious, announcing the availability of iTunes and access to the company's music store for Windows users. (In what seemed an odd crack in Apple's usually seamless aura maintenance, he did his demo on what was clearly a Dell computer.) The announcement included a deal with AOL and a huge promotion with Pepsi. The message was obvious: Apple is aiming squarely at the mainstream.

This sounded like a sea change. But while you can run iTunes on Windows and hook it up to an iPod, that iPod does not play songs in the formats used by any other seller of digital music, like Napster or Rhapsody. Nor will music bought through Apple's store play on any rival device. (The iPod does, of course, work easily with the MP3 format that's common on free file-swapping services, like KaZaA, that the music industry wants to shut down but that are still much more popular than anything requiring money.) This means Apple is, again, competing against a huge number of players across multiple business segments, who by and large will support one another's products and services. In light of this, says one of those competitors, Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks, "It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market."

(via Instapaper)

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Jave - d on purity

2012-01-02T01:36:00.001-08:00

Javed Akhtar: That's for others to decide. But 'purity of language' is a very Fascist word. Looking for purity of language is like trying to peel the onion to find the onion. There is nothing like purity of language — in fact, it's a very regressive thought.

Language changes with time. What is important is that you should not be grammatically wrong. Vocabulary changes due to different influences. Dialogue does not mean writing flowery or bookish language.

Now many people praise our dialogues in Sholay, "Sahab kya dialogue likha hai, kitne aadmi the..." But what's so surprising in that? That's normal language. May be it was used in a very good situation. As a dialogue writer, if you try to measure an emotion or a feeling, you will fall flat.

You should only give the tip of the iceberg and leave the rest of the iceberg to the audience's imagination. You cannot make a bigger iceberg than the viewer's feelings or imagination. Bad dialogue is when it fails in its endeavour to achieve something. Sometimes people try to be humorous but end up being crude.

Article: Ugh. God. Why Is Apple Making Everything Look Like an Ugly Wild West? [letsgetcritical.org]

2012-01-01T04:28:00.001-08:00

Ugh. God. Why Is Apple Making Everything Look Like an Ugly Wild West? [letsgetcritical.org]
http://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-everything-look-like-an-ugly-wild-west

Why is Apple doing this now? Who put the company on this foul, cud-spittin' trajectory? For the first time in, oh I don't know, probably ever, Microsoft is displaying a keener aesthetic eye than Apple. Digest that. Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 proudly eschew all skeuomorphism—any semblance to the real world is kicked in the Recycle Bin. The ultra-flat, super-contrasty interfaces of both are a triumph of digitalism. The New Windows, whether desktop or mobile, makes no attempt to look like anything in the real world. And it works wonderfully—both are beautiful because they embrace their pixels, not strive for faux woodgrain or marble or some other digital trompe l'oeil. Apple's users are, increasingly, generations that can't relate to these quaint analogies. I've never used an address book. I don't need to be comforted by pseudo-fabrics. Apple itself said "In general, metaphors work best when they're not stretched too far. For example, the usability of software folders would decrease if they had to be organized into a virtual filing cabinet." And it's done just that. Ugly, ugly hypocrisy.

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Elephant nd Dragon

2011-12-31T03:29:00.001-08:00

India adds eight to 10 million people to the workforce every year. China, the only other country that has a comparable demographic to India, adds only 1.5 million to the workforce every year.

Its a btch

2011-12-31T03:23:00.000-08:00

David Lodge's endearing position ('Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round')

Fe

2011-12-31T03:05:00.001-08:00

Denise Riley once wrote: It is not possible to live 24 hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one's sex.

Not another pls

2011-12-31T03:03:00.001-08:00

Stephen Marche who once wrote, "Every time I receive a copy of a new novel about growing up Russian or growing up Portuguese or growing up whatever, I have the same desperate thought: Can't we all agree we've written this book before and that we don't have to write it again?"

Online Poker’s Big Winner [via SportsFeat]

2011-12-28T05:23:00.000-08:00

During his junior year, he began playing in local live-action poker games held in the kitchens and living rooms of people whom he describes as "not really friends." Despite the relatively low stakes involved, Cates managed to lose several thousand dollars over a period of three months. The losses alarmed his parents, who put a freeze on his savings account. Faced with a cash-flow problem and owing $600 to a fellow player, Cates took a job at McDonald's. But he continued to play poker with a dogged mantra. "I knew that if I just kept working at poker, my game would vastly improve," he said. "When I started playing Minesweeper, I thought it was inconceivable that someone could clear all the mines in 90 seconds. Then I kept working at it. Before I knew it, I had accomplished what I thought was impossible. The same thing happened with poker. When I started out playing low limits, I'd look up at a guy playing with $2,000 and think, How is he doing that? He must be so good. But I just kept working at it. Eventually, everything changed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/magazine/mag-27Poker-t.html?pagewanted=all

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The Glory of Oprah [via longform.org]

2011-12-27T01:31:00.000-08:00

There are certain things about women that men will never understand, in part because they have no interest in understanding them. They will never know how deeply we care about our houses—what a large role they play in our dreams for ourselves, how unhappy their shortcomings make us. Men think they understand the way our physical beauty—or lack of it, or assaults on it from age or extra weight—preys on our minds, but they don't fully grasp the significance these things have for us. Nor can they understand the way physical comforts or simple luxuries—the fresh towel or the fat new cake of soap—can lift our spirits. And they will never know how much our lives are shaped around the fear of bad men and the harm they can bring us if we're not careful, if we're not banded together, if we're not telling each other what to watch out for, what we've learned. We need each other's counsel, and oftentimes it comes when we're talking about other things, when we seem not to have much important on our minds at all.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/12/the-glory-of-oprah/8725/

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The Glory of Oprah [via longform.org]

2011-12-27T01:16:00.000-08:00

Longtime viewers of Oprah know that the host has a particular subspecialty in the husband-stealing best friend. Husband-stealing best friends are right up there with women who can't give away a single pair of old shoes from a jam-packed closet and men who won't do their fair share of the housework: such regular presences on the Oprah show that they are almost members of a commedia troupe. But the true author of Shania's suffering, although she could not yet perceive it, was not the best friend; it was a succession of malevolent men: the abusive stepfather, the molesting neighbor, the cheating husband. Oprah, more than any other broadcaster ever, understands the ways men can hurt women, and it is this knowledge—hard-earned and openly shared with her audience—that has allowed her to forge such a powerful bond with her fans. That she can move so easily between episodes about, on the one hand, rape and domestic violence and, on the other, shopping and decorating, demonstrates not a lack of focus but the fact that she understands the full equation of the female experience, in ways that few others before her have. This understanding also accounts for the deep suspicion she arouses in so many men, who as a group tend to be wary of her, if not outright hostile. They're not wrong to feel this way; she's onto them. She has survived some of the worst they have to offer. Like Alice Walker, Oprah has been accused of hating men, black men in particular. But her attitude toward men is much more complicated and generous than they realize. It's only when you fully apprehend the range and nature of the cruelty that men are capable of inflicting on women that you can truly appreciate its opposite. It has been Oprah's bad and good fortune (she often says she would not on any condition change the circumstances of her young life) to have fully experienced the former.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/12/the-glory-of-oprah/8725/

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the type of guy

2011-12-25T12:40:00.001-08:00

He is one of those who would murder his parents and then beg for mercy on the grounds of being an orphan.

the terrorist

2011-12-25T12:15:00.001-08:00

Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy for Ha'aretz, more than a decade ago, when he was asked what he would have done had he been born a Palestinian: "I would have joined a terrorist organization." This statement had nothing whatsoever to do with endorsing terrorism - but it had everything to do with opening a space for a dialogue with the Palestinians. Remember Gorbachev launching the slogans of glasnost and perestroika - no matter what how he "really meant" them, he unleashed an avalanche which changed the world. Or, to take a negative example: today, even those who oppose torture accept it as a topic of public debate - a major regression in our common discourse. Words are never "barely words":

Wat he wrote

2011-12-25T06:57:00.001-08:00

an Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!" Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands. Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening--and trying ever so delicately to oblige. "Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you. Then, you can buy the [comic] book, and then, when you're of more, say, appropriate age, you can buy the car and pornographic magazines on your own."

It's pretty amazing that a 15-year-old could get a big-time software firm to grovel like that. What's more amazing, though, is how Ian got Jukt's attention--by breaking into its databases. In March, Restil--whose nom de plume is "Big Bad Bionic Boy"--used a computer at his high school library to hack into Jukt. Once he got past the company's online security system, he posted every employee's salary on the company's website alongside more than a dozen pictures of naked women, each with the caption: "the big bad boy has been here baby." After weeks of trying futilely to figure out how Ian cracked the security program, Jukt's engineers gave up. That's when the company came to Ian's Bethesda, Maryland, home--to hire him.

And Ian, clever boy that he is, had been expecting them. "The principal told us to hire a defense lawyer fast, because Ian was in deep trouble," says his mother, Jamie Restil. "Ian laughed and told us to get an agent. Our boy was definitely right." Ian says he knew that Jukt would determine it was cheaper to hire him—and pay him to fix their database--than it would be to have engineers do it. And he knew this because the same thing had happened to more than a dozen online friends.

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ഈ ഭാഷ ക്ളാസിക്കലാകുന്നതെങ്ങനെ?

2011-12-25T06:22:00.001-08:00

സര്‍ഗാത്മക സാഹിത്യത്തില്‍ പ്രതിഫലിക്കുന്ന മനുഷ്യാവസ്ഥയുടെ മറ്റൊരു വശമാണ് നാം ചരിത്രമെന്ന് പറയുന്നതിലൂടെ അന്വേഷിക്കുന്നത്. ആ നിലക്കാണ് ഞാന്‍ കുറച്ചുനാളായി നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടില്‍ ഇറങ്ങിയിരിക്കുന്ന ഒരുകൂട്ടം കപട ഭാഷാസ്നേഹികളുടെ മലയാളത്തെ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷയാക്കണം എന്ന വാദത്തെയും സമീപിക്കുന്നത്. മലയാളികള്‍ സ്വതവേ കാപടികന്മരാണ്. അതുകൊണ്ട്, നമ്മള്‍ ചെയ്തുവന്നിരുന്നത് മലയാള ഭാഷയെ അവഗണിക്കുക എന്നതായിരുന്നു. അതാണ് നല്ലത്, തന്തയും തള്ളയും ഒന്നും ഇല്ലാതെ പപ്പയും മമ്മയുമൊക്കെ മാത്രമായി ജീവിച്ചുകൂടേ എന്നുള്ള പ്രായോഗിക മനഃസ്ഥിതി വന്നതുകൊണ്ട് മലയാളഭാഷ സ്കൂളില്‍ കുട്ടികളെ പഠിപ്പിക്കാന്‍ ഇഷ്ടമില്ലാതായി. എന്നാല്‍, ഇപ്പോള്‍ കുറെ കപട ഭാഷാസ്നേഹികള്‍ ഇറങ്ങിയിരിക്കുകയാണ്, മലയാളത്തെ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷയാക്കണം എന്നാവശ്യപ്പെട്ടുകൊണ്ട്.
കഴിഞ്ഞ സര്‍ക്കാറിന്‍െറ കാലത്ത്, മുഖ്യമന്ത്രിയായിരുന്ന വി.എസും പിന്നെ പറഞ്ഞാല്‍ കേള്‍ക്കുന്ന കുറെ സാഹിത്യകാരന്മാരുമൊക്കെ ചേര്‍ന്നിട്ട് മലയാളഭാഷയെക്കുറിച്ച് പുതിയൊരു രേഖ എഴുതിയുണ്ടാക്കിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. മഹാകവികളൊക്കെയുണ്ട് ആ കൂട്ടത്തില്‍; ഒ.എന്‍.വിയുണ്ട്, സുഗതയുണ്ട്, അങ്ങനെ പലരുണ്ട്. പക്ഷേ, എങ്ങനെയാണ് ഇവര്‍ ഈ ഭാഷയുടെ കാലം നിര്‍ണയിക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് എനിക്ക് അറിഞ്ഞുകൂടാ. ഇവര്‍ ആയിരത്തിചില്വാനം പേജുള്ള ഒരു പ്രമാണം എഴുതിയുണ്ടാക്കി അന്നത്തെ മുഖ്യമന്ത്രിയുടെ അധ്യക്ഷതയില്‍ അന്നത്തെ പ്രധാനമന്ത്രിക്ക് സമര്‍പ്പിക്കുകയും ചെയ്തിട്ടുണ്ട്.
കേരളത്തില്‍ ഭരണകക്ഷി മാറിയെന്നല്ലാതെ കാര്യം മാറിയിട്ടില്ല. പുതിയ നേതൃത്വത്തിലുള്ളവരും ഈയിടെ പറയാന്‍ തുടങ്ങിയിട്ടുണ്ട്, മലയാളത്തിന്‍െറ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവി ഉടനെ ശരിയാകുമെന്നൊക്കെ. ഞാന്‍ കുറെനാളായി ശ്രമിക്കുന്നു അവര്‍ എഴുതിയുണ്ടാക്കിയ ആ പ്രമാണം ഒന്നു കാണാന്‍. ഇപ്പോള്‍ ഉടനെ മലയാളത്തിന് ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവി കിട്ടും എന്നുപറയുന്ന സര്‍ക്കാറോ കഴിഞ്ഞ സര്‍ക്കാറിന്‍െറ കാലത്ത് അത് എഴുതിയുണ്ടാക്കിയവരോ ധൈര്യമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍, ആര്‍ജവമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ ആ രേഖയൊന്ന് പ്രസിദ്ധീകരിച്ച് കാണട്ടെ. അത് ചെയ്യുന്നില്ല. കാരണം, അതില്‍ നിറയെ കള്ളങ്ങളാണ്. എനിക്കത് ധൈര്യമായി പറയാം. കാരണം, അതിന്‍െറ ചില ഭാഗങ്ങളൊക്കെ ചോര്‍ന്നുകിട്ടിയിട്ടുണ്ട്.
ഭാഷയുടെ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവിയെന്ന് പറയുന്നത് ഒരു വലിയ കാര്യമാണ്, ലോകത്തിന്‍െറ ചരിത്രത്തില്‍ എവിടെയും ഇല്ല ഒരു ഭാഷക്ക് ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവി സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ദാനമായിട്ട് കൊടുക്കുന്നത്. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ദാനമായിട്ടല്ല ഒരു ഭാഷയുടെയും ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവി ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുള്ളത്. യൂറോപ്പില്‍ ലാറ്റിന്‍ ഭാഷയും ഗ്രീക്ക് ഭാഷയും ഒരളവോളം ഹീബ്രു ഭാഷയുമൊക്കെ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷയായി അംഗീകരിക്കപ്പെട്ടത് സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ തീരുമാനിച്ചിട്ടല്ല. റോമന്‍ ചക്രവര്‍ത്തിമാര്‍ ശക്തിയുള്ള സീസര്‍മാരായിരുന്നു, അവരുപോലും അത്തരമൊരു തീരുമാനം എടുത്തിട്ടില്ല. കാരണം, ഭാഷയുടെ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവിയെന്നത് പണ്ഡിതന്മാര്‍ക്കിടയിലുള്ള സര്‍വസമ്മതമായ അംഗീകാരത്തിലൂടെ ഉണ്ടാകുന്നത്. യൂറോപ്യന്‍ ഭാഷകളില്‍ സമ്പന്നമായ പലതുണ്ട്, റഷ്യനുണ്ട്, ജര്‍മനുണ്ട്, ഫ്രഞ്ചുണ്ട്. ഇംഗ്ളീഷെന്താ മോശം, ഷേക്സ്പിയറിന്‍െറ കാലത്തുതന്നെ ഒന്നാന്തരം സമ്പന്ന ഭാഷയല്ളേ? പക്ഷേ, അവരാരും ഞങ്ങളുടേത് ക്ളാസിക്കലാണ് എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞിട്ടില്ല, പറയാന്‍ നാവുയര്‍ത്തിയിട്ടില്ല, പറയാന്‍ ആലോചിച്ചിട്ടില്ല. മാത്രമല്ല, ഞങ്ങളുടേത് മോഡേണ്‍ യൂറോപ്യന്‍ ഭാഷകളിലൊന്നാണ് എന്നാണ് അവരൊക്കെ വാദിക്കുന്നത്, അഭിമാനിക്കുന്നത്.
ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷകള്‍ക്ക് കാലക്രമത്തില്‍ ഒരു നിര്‍വചനം വന്നിട്ടുണ്ട്. ഒരു നാഗരികതയുടെ ആരംഭകാലത്തുള്ള ചില നൂറ്റാണ്ടുകളിലായിട്ട് ആ നാഗരികതയുടെ അടിസ്ഥാന ഗ്രന്ഥങ്ങള്‍ ആ ഭാഷയില്‍ ഉണ്ടാകുകയും പിന്നീട് ആ ഭാഷയില്‍നിന്ന് മറ്റ് ആധുനിക ഭാഷകളും സാഹിത്യങ്ങളും സൃഷ്ടിക്കപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്തിട്ടുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ ആതാണ് ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷയെന്നാണ് ആ നിര്‍വചനം. ഇതിന് ആദ്യം നിയമം ഉണ്ടാക്കുകയല്ല, അല്ളെങ്കില്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ പദവി ദാനംചെയ്യുകയല്ല ചെയ്തിട്ടുള്ളത്, പണ്ഡിതന്മാര്‍ക്കിടയില്‍ ഉരുത്തിരിഞ്ഞ ഒരു അഭിപ്രായത്തിന്‍െറ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തില്‍ കാലക്രമത്തില്‍ ഒരു നിര്‍വചനം രൂപപ്പെടുകയാണ് ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുള്ളത്. ഇന്ത്യയിലും അത്തരത്തിലൊന്ന് ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുണ്ട്. ഇന്ത്യയില്‍ അത്തരത്തിലൊരു അംഗീകാരം ഉള്ളത് സംസ്കൃതത്തിനും പഴന്തമിഴിനുമാണ്. ഇന്നത്തെ തമിഴല്ല, പഴയ തമിഴ്. അതാകട്ടെ ചോദ്യം ചെയ്യപ്പെടാതെ നിലനിന്നുവന്നതുമാണ്.
ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ഭാഷ സംബന്ധിച്ച ചരിത്രം ഇതായിരിക്കെ പിന്നെങ്ങനെ മലയാളത്തിന്‍െറ കാര്യത്തില്‍ ഇതുണ്ടായി? അതിന് കാരണം മുമ്പ് പറഞ്ഞ മലയാളികളുടെ സ്വാഭാവികമായ കാപട്യവും പിന്നെ പണവുമാണ്. ഞാന്‍ ഈ രേഖയുണ്ടാക്കിയ സംഘത്തിലെ, എനിക്ക് വളരെ ബഹുമാനമുള്ള ഒരാളോട് ചോദിക്കുകയുണ്ടായി, എന്തിനാണ് ഈ പണിക്ക് പോയത് എന്ന്. മറുപടി കിട്ടിയത്, നമുക്കും നൂറുകോടി കിട്ടിയാല്‍ നന്നല്ളേ മലയാളത്തിന് എന്നായിരുന്നു. അതായത് നമുക്കും കിട്ടണം പണം. എന്നുവെച്ചാല്‍, അവര്‍ക്ക് പണം കിട്ടണം എന്നല്ല, ഭാഷക്ക് കിട്ടിക്കോട്ടെ എന്ന സദുദ്ദേശ്യമായിരിക്കാം, പക്ഷേ, ആ സദുദ്ദേശ്യംകൊണ്ട് ശുദ്ധന്‍ ദുഷ്ടന്‍െറ ഫലം ചെയ്യുമെന്നതുപോലെ മലയാളത്തിന് അപമാനമാണ് വരുത്തിവെക്കുക. കാരണം, മലയാളത്തിന് അതിന് അര്‍ഹതയില്ല.
ഞാന്‍ കണ്ടിടത്തോളവും അറിഞ്ഞിടത്തോളവും ഇവരുണ്ടാക്കിയ പ്രമാണത്തില്‍ എഴുതിയിട്ടുള്ളത് ചില പഴന്തമിഴ് കൃതികളിലും പ്രാകൃതത്തിന്‍െറ പല രൂപങ്ങളിലുമൊക്കെയുള്ള പല വാക്കുകളും മലയാള ഭാഷയില്‍ നിലനിന്നുപോന്നിട്ടുണ്ട് എന്നാണ്. സംഘകാലത്ത് ഉപയോഗിച്ചിരുന്ന പല വാക്കുകളും ഇന്നത്തെ മലയാളത്തില്‍ തന്നെയുണ്ട്. സംഘകാലത്തുള്ള കൃതികളില്‍ ഉപയോഗിച്ചിട്ടുള്ള പല വാക്കുകളും ഇന്നത്തെ മലയാളത്തില്‍ ഉണ്ടെന്നത് ഉള്ളൂരും വടക്കന്‍കൂറും അവരുടെ കേരള സാഹിത്യചരിത്രമെഴുതിയപ്പോഴൊക്കെതന്നെ ചൂണ്ടിക്കാണിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളതുമാണ്. പഴയ ഭാഷകളില്‍നിന്ന് പല വാക്കുകളും പുതിയ ഭാഷകള്‍ സ്വീകരിക്കാറുണ്ട്. കസേര, മേശ മുതലായ നിരവധി വാക്കുകള്‍ പറങ്കികളുടെ ഭാഷയില്‍നിന്ന് മലയാളം എടുത്തിട്ടുണ്ട്. പലവാക്കുകളും ചൈനീസില്‍നിന്ന് മലയാളത്തിലേക്ക് വന്നിട്ടുണ്ട്. അറബിയില്‍നിന്നും ധാരാളം എടുത്തിട്ടുണ്ട്. അങ്ങനെ കടമെടുത്ത് കടമെടുത്താണ് ഒരു ഭാഷ വലുതാകുന്നത്. അതുവെച്ചിട്ട്, പഴന്തമിഴ് ഭാഷയിലെ ചില കൃതികളില്‍ മലയാളത്തിലെ ഇന്നയിന്ന വാക്കുകളുണ്ട് അതുകൊണ്ട് മലയാളം അന്നുണ്ടായിരുന്നു എന്ന് നിര്‍ണയിക്കുന്നത് ശരിയല്ല.
നമ്മുടെ ഇപ്പോഴുള്ള ലിപി അടുത്തകാലത്ത് ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുള്ളതാണ്. ഏതാണ്ട് പതിനാറാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടിനുശേഷമേ അത് ഉപയോഗിച്ച് കാണുന്നുള്ളൂ. അതിനുമുമ്പുമുണ്ട്, സംസ്കൃതം എഴുതാന്‍ ഉപയോഗിച്ചിരുന്നു. ഇന്ന് നമ്മള്‍ മലയാളം എഴുതാന്‍ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നതും പണ്ട് സംസ്കൃതം എഴുതാന്‍ ദക്ഷിണേന്ത്യയില്‍ എല്ലായിടത്തും ഉപയോഗിച്ചിരുന്നതുമായ ലിപിയാണത്. ഒമ്പതാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടില്‍ നമ്മുടെ സാഹിത്യകാരന്മാര്‍, കവികള്‍, നാടകകൃത്തുക്കള്‍ ഒക്കെതന്നെ ഒന്നുകില്‍ തമിഴില്‍ അല്ളെങ്കില്‍ സംസ്കൃതത്തിലാണ് എഴുതിയിരുന്നത്. കുലശേഖര ആഴ്വാരുടെ പെരുമാള്‍ തിരുമൊഴി, ചേരമാന്‍പെരുമാള്‍ നായനാരുടെ ശൈവ സ്തുതി പരമായിട്ടുള്ള കൃതികളൊക്കെ തമിഴില്‍, ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ എന്നുതന്നെ പറയാവുന്ന തമിഴ് ഭാഷയില്‍ എഴുതിയിട്ടുള്ളതാണ് ഇന്നും പ്രചാരത്തിലുള്ളത്.
ആദ്യമായി കേരളം എന്ന ഒരു ഭൂപ്രദേശം ഏതാണ്ടൊരു ഭരണത്തിന്‍െറ കീഴിലായത് ഒമ്പതാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടിലാണ്. അതുവരെ കേരളം ഇല്ല . അതുവരെ ചേരവംശക്കാരായിട്ടുള്ള ആളുകള്‍ തമിഴ്നാടിന്‍െറ ഹൃദയത്തിലുള്ള , തൃശ്നാപ്പള്ളിക്കടുത്തുള്ള കരൂര്‍ എന്ന സ്ഥലം സംസ്ഥാനമാക്കി അവിടെ പല പ്രദേശങ്ങളും ഭരിച്ചിരുന്നതാണ്. പിന്നീട,് റോമന്‍ വാണിജ്യത്തിന്‍െറ ആകര്‍ഷണം കാരണം ഇവിടെവന്ന് രണ്ടു തുറമുഖങ്ങളില്‍ ആധിപത്യം സ്ഥാപിച്ചെന്നല്ലാതെ അന്ന് കേരളം ഇല്ല. കേരളം കാടുപിടിച്ച് കിടക്കുകയാണ്. ഇരുമ്പുയുഗം തുടങ്ങി കുറെകഴിഞ്ഞിട്ടുമാത്രമാണ് ആ കാടുകള്‍ വെട്ടിത്തെളിയിക്കപ്പെട്ടത്. അന്ന് മലയാള ഭാഷയില്ല. കേരളീയം എന്നു പറയുന്ന സാംസ്കാരിക സ്വത്വമുള്ള ഒരു സംസ്കാരം ഉണ്ട്, തമിഴ് സംസ്കാരത്തിന്‍െറ ഭാഗം. അതില്‍ അഭിമാനിച്ചിരുന്നവരാണ് നേരത്തേ പറഞ്ഞ സാഹിത്യകാരന്മാരൊക്കെ. പിന്നീട് പോര്‍ച്ചുഗീസുകാരും ഡച്ചുകാരും ഇംഗ്ളീഷുകാരുമൊക്കെ വന്ന് കുറെ കഴിഞ്ഞാണ് മൂന്നായി മുറിഞ്ഞ് കിടന്നിരുന്ന കേരളം ഐക്യകേരളമാകുന്നതും നമ്മുടെ ഭാഷയാകുന്നതും. എഴുത്തച്ഛനും പൂന്താനവുമൊക്കെ എഴുതിയതാണ് മലയാള ഭാഷയിലെ ആദ്യത്തെ കൃതികള്‍.
ഇതുപറഞ്ഞപ്പോള്‍ തിരുവനന്തപുരത്ത് ഒരു സൃഹൃത്ത് ചോദിച്ചു, അപ്പോള്‍ 'വൈശികതന്ത്ര'മില്ളേയെന്ന്. ശരിയാണ് 'വൈശികതന്ത്ര'മുണ്ട്. അതില്‍ പതിമൂന്നാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടിന്‍െറ അവസാനത്തില്‍ എന്നാണ് വെച്ചിരിക്കുന്നത്, അത് മിക്കവാറും ശരിയുമാണ്. 'വൈശികതന്ത്രം' എന്താണ് , അതൊരു ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ കൃതിയല്ല. അപ്പോള്‍ അദ്ദേഹം പറഞ്ഞു നിങ്ങളൊക്കെ സവര്‍ണരല്ളേ നിങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് 'കാമസൂത്രം' ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ കൃതിയായിരിക്കും 'വൈശികതന്ത്രം' ആകില്ല എന്ന്. സവര്‍ണരായതുകൊണ്ടോ അവര്‍ണരായതുകൊണ്ടോ അല്ല, 'കാമസൂത്രം' എന്ന കൃതി ലൈംഗിക ചേഷ്ടകളെ നഗ്നമായി വിവരിക്കുന്ന ഒരു കൃതിയാണ് എന്ന് ആരെങ്കിലും തെറ്റിദ്ധരിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍, ആ കൃതി കുറച്ചൊക്കെ പഠിച്ചയാളെന്നനിലക്ക് എനിക്ക് പറയാനാകും അങ്ങനെയല്ല എന്ന്. ആ കാലത്തുള്ള സാംസ്കാരിക ജീവിതത്തിന്‍െറ പല വശങ്ങളും, എങ്ങനെയാണ് ഒരു നാഗരികന്‍ പെരുമാറേണ്ടത്, എങ്ങനെയാണ് മാന്യനായി ജിവിക്കേണ്ടത് എന്നിങ്ങനെയുള്ള പല കാര്യങ്ങളും വിശദീകരിക്കുന്നതിന്‍െറ കൂടെ ലൈംഗിക കാര്യങ്ങളും പറയുന്നു എന്നേയുള്ളൂ. 'വൈശികതന്ത്രം' അതല്ല, ഒരു മുത്തശ്ശി തന്‍െറ മകളുടെ മകള്‍ക്ക് എങ്ങനെയാണ് നല്ളൊരു വേശ്യയായിട്ട് പണം സമ്പാദിക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞുകൊടുക്കുന്നതാണ്. അതൊന്നും ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ കൃതിയല്ല.
പിന്നെന്തിനാണ് നമ്മുടെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഈ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പരിപാടി കൊണ്ടുവന്നത്? കമ്യൂണിസ്റ്റുകളാണല്ളോ മന്‍മോഹന്‍സിങ്ങിന്‍െറ ആദ്യത്തെ മന്ത്രിസഭയെ ഭരിച്ചിരുന്നത്. കാരണം, അവര്‍ 18-19 അംഗങ്ങളുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. അപ്പോള്‍ അവരുടെ കല്‍പനകളാണ് നടന്നിരുന്നത്, അവരുടെ വോട്ടുകൊണ്ടാണ് ആ ഭരണകൂടം ആടിയായി മുന്നോട്ട് പോയിരുന്നത്. ആ സമയത്ത് പല തന്ത്രങ്ങള്‍ കമ്യൂണിസ്റ്റുകള്‍ പ്രയോഗിച്ചു, അതിലൊന്നായിരുന്നു ഈ ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ പദവി. അതിന് അവര്‍ തെലുങ്കിലെ സാഹിത്യകാരന്‍ കൃഷ്ണമൂര്‍ത്തി , കന്നടയിലെ, നമ്മുടെ കോട്ടയത്തെ യൂണിവേഴ്സിറ്റി വൈസ് ചാന്‍സലറായിരുന്ന അനന്തമൂര്‍ത്തി എന്നിവരെ ഉപയോഗിച്ച് കേന്ദ്രസാഹിത്യ അക്കാദമിയെ വളച്ചുതിരിച്ച് ഒരു പുതിയ നിര്‍വചനം ഉണ്ടാക്കി. അതുപ്രകാരം ഒരു ഭാഷക്ക് 2000 കൊല്ലം പഴക്കം മതി ക്ളാസിക്കല്‍ ആകണമെങ്കില്‍ എന്നായിരുന്നു. പക്ഷേ, അത്രയും പഴക്കം കന്നടക്കും തെലുങ്കിനുമൊന്നുമിലല്ളോ എന്ന് ചിലര്‍ പറഞ്ഞപ്പോള്‍ വെട്ടിക്കുറച്ച് 1500 കൊല്ലം എന്നാക്കി. അപ്പോള്‍, വേറെ ചിലര്‍ അത്രയും ഇല്ലല്ളോ എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞപ്പോള്‍ എന്നാല്‍ ആയിരം ആക്കാം എന്നുപറഞ്ഞ് വെട്ടിക്കുറച്ച് ഇപ്പോള്‍ ആയിരം കൊല്ലം പഴക്കം മതി എന്നതിലാണ് നില്‍ക്കുന്നത്.
ഇങ്ങനെ രണ്ടായിരത്തില്‍നിന്ന് ലേലംവിളിച്ച് ലേലംവിളിച്ച് ആയിരമാക്കി നൂറുകോടി രൂപ സമ്മാനം കൊടുത്തിരിക്കുകയാണ്. ഇതിന് പുതിയ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ കൂട്ടുനില്‍ക്കരുതെന്നൊരു അഭ്യര്‍ഥന എനിക്കുണ്ട്, സാഹിത്യകാരന്മാര്‍ ഇത്തരം സാഹിത്യത്തെയും രാഷ്ട്രീയത്തെയും ആധാരമാക്കിയുള്ള കുതിരക്കച്ചവടത്തില്‍ പങ്കാളികളാകരുത്. നമ്മുടെ ഭാഷ, നമ്മുടെ അഭിമാനം, സംസ്കാരം നിലനിര്‍ത്താന്‍ ഈ വക കാപട്യങ്ങളല്ല വേണ്ടത്. അതിന് മറ്റു വഴികള്‍ തേടണം. ഭരണ ഭാഷ മലയാളത്തിലാക്കാം, ഇംഗ്ളീഷിലുള്ള സാങ്കേതികപദങ്ങള്‍ അതേപടി തര്‍ജ്ജമ ചെയ്യുന്നതിനുപകരം മലയാളത്തിലുള്ള പദങ്ങള്‍ എടുത്തുപയോഗിക്കാം, ഇതൊക്കെ സാര്‍വത്രികമാക്കാന്‍ നമ്മുടെ പഴയ മഹത്തായ കൃതികള്‍ക്ക് വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികള്‍ക്കിടയില്‍ പ്രചാരം കൊടുക്കാം.

(സമസ്തകേരള സാഹിത്യ പരിഷത്തിന്‍െറ ഈ വര്‍ഷത്തെ ഭാഷാവാരാചരണം ഉദ്ഘാടനം ചെയുകൊണ്ട് നടത്തിയ പ്രസംഗത്തില്‍നിന്ന്.)

Sent from my iPad

2011-12-25T01:19:00.001-08:00

"An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned," wrote V.S. Naipaul in an essay about Michael X. [Correction, May 22, 2003: Michael X is not a fictional character.] ""An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned," wrote V.S. Naipaul in an essay about the fictional Michael X. [Correction, May 22, 2003: Michael X is not a fictional character.] "But fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally." fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally."

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Glass agn

2011-12-24T23:48:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately for Glass, he is now permanently disqualified from using those reportorial skills, and so he has turned to fiction. After he was caught, I often heard it said that he should write novels. Perhaps he heard this himself and took it to heart. But it was clear all along that this notion was terribly misguided. He never had much talent for prose. When his stories read well, it usually resulted from heavy rewriting, most notably by Kelly. (Very often he would hand his stories to me minutes before they were due, and, to save him from embarrassment, I would perform a kind of emergency triage on his text, rearranging it into something resembling a coherent structure.) Moreover, his stories were interesting only because they were purportedly true. The characters in his stories, as in his novel, lack any depth or believability. What dooms him most of all as a novelist is the very thing that doomed his journalistic career: He lacks any capacity for grappling with moral questions.

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Article: Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair

2011-12-24T22:58:00.001-08:00

Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair
http://m.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809

Still, Glass grew more emboldened. By the beginning of 1998, he had begun to routinely invent stories almost in their entirety. A possible explanation is that now, in addition to his many magazine assignments, he was attending Georgetown University Law Center. In January, he wrote a largely concocted piece about HDT, a fictional New York–based company that for $25,000 each would drop travelers in the wilderness and supervise them unobtrusively. Fortune's Ed Brown, a writer-reporter, called Glass afterward to say that he had been unable to locate the company. He wondered aloud if the piece had been intended as a joke. It should have been a warning to Glass.

Glass and Lane were in the Honda at the corner of Abermarle and Wisconsin, near a Hechinger retail store, when Glass burst into tears. Concerned that the kid might have an accident, Lane took the wheel. Sobbing on Lane's shoulder, Glass told the editor how his life was falling apart, and explained how his parents had pressured him to attend law school and how he thought Lane would fire him if he didn't keep up his productivity at the magazine.

(via Instapaper)

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Article: Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair

2011-12-24T22:50:00.001-08:00

Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair
http://m.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809

"The nickname for Steve was Hub," said Michael Crowley, who worked at The New Republic with Glass when they were interns. "He was constantly on the make. Constantly needing this steady supply of dish. [He] needed to have relationships with everyone. He just knew all the office gossip. He knew everything. That's why, to some extent, his reporting was credible—he knew everything inside the magazine, so why wouldn't he figure out what was going on in the world of his stories?"

If there was one aspect of Glass's personality that seemed indisputably genuine, it was this nonstop yearning to please. He had a near-masochistic inability to say no to anyone in authority.

"That was the weirdest thing about him," said a former colleague. "That held back my ability to respect him and like him a lot. It was really preposterous and cartoonish. It also made him impossible to deal with on the same level that you deal with other people. There was some sort of a core that was missing, that core sense of confidence and security."

"Are you mad at me?" That was something Glass said incessantly. The slightest look or gesture could send him into a panic of self-doubt. Certain friends advised him to stop asking the question; others found that it called forth their protective instincts. Glass's would-be parent surrogates wanted only to help make this terribly insecure boy, who would describe a story he wrote as a "piece of shit," feel better about himself.

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Article: Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair

2011-12-24T22:45:00.001-08:00

Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair
http://m.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809

Stephen, on the other hand, had a squeaky voice, wore ultra-preppy clothes, and sometimes seemed effeminate. And he had to grapple with something else: his parents had wanted him to be a doctor. Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track, or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine. Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished—slightly less than a B.

"His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior. There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine, doing fine," said Klein.

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Article: Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair

2011-12-24T22:38:00.001-08:00

Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair
http://m.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809

Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down was himself.

He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance. Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.

"He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."

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Article: Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair

2011-12-24T22:34:00.001-08:00

Shattered Glass | magazine | Vanity Fair
http://m.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809

For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered.

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Yin and Yang

2011-12-14T02:29:00.001-08:00

Most important, there is temperament and character. As Yuval Levin noted in a post for National Review, the two Republican front-runners, Gingrich and Mitt Romney are both "very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right."

But they have very different temperaments. Romney, Levin observes, has an executive temperament — organization, discipline, calm and restraint. Gingrich has a revolutionary temperament — intensity, energy, disorganization and a tendency to see everything as a cataclysmic clash requiring a radical response.

I'd make a slightly similar point more rudely. In the two main Republican contenders, we have one man, Romney, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1950s, and another, Gingrich, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with '60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.

2011-11-27T04:21:00.001-08:00

EDIT/OP-ED

A Satanic Brew

Wodeyar, the king, is fat and perplexed in Mysore, says Paul Zacharia. But years of feudal loyalty may yet win him an election

If looks are an index, it appears to me, a lion's share of the candidates who force their forced smiles upon you from life-size posters in Bangalore and Mysore, are nothing but the earth's scum. These are faces fattened by greed, bloated by arrogant stupidity and coated with criminality. I have a poor opinion of the politicians of my own naadu — Kerala. But having seen this line-up, I must admit that I have a distinct feeling — or illusion — that the Kerala breed is several notches ahead on the homo sapiens scale. (If I were asked to record the most important unimportant merit of the Kerala politician, I would say it is that most of them are not fat. But that makes them hungrier, I fear.)

But, apparently, there are swamis in Karnataka outdoing the politicians. It tickled me to see the picture in Bangalore newspapers of Gowrishankara Swamy, junior pontiff of the Siddaganga Mutt of Tumkur, surrendering at the police station smiling sweetly after evading arrest for several days for the pedestrian sin of sodomy. It's not the sodomy that tickled me. That goes with the world of spirit in most religions. The sweet man had the stuff in him to try and file his papers as a candidate from Tumkur constituency while in hiding. It was by chance that his papers were rejected — nothing less than an ungodly miracle!

Such unworthy thoughts fill me as I board the Shatabdi Express from Bangalore for Mysore, the parliamentary constituency of Wodeyar, the king. Right from the times of the smoke-hurling steam engines of the Sixties, I have always had the sensation on the Bangalore-Mysore rail route that I was gliding and swinging through an intimate world in which rails did not exist. May be it has to do with the engineering of the railroad, may be with the engineering of my mind, but there's always a sense of speed and of being light and swaying. With romantic regret I bemoaned the loss of my steam-engine youth but was happy to see that I was still gliding and swinging on the Shatabdi.
The Wodeyars, rajahs of Mysore now aka Karnataka, and their grand palaces were part of that youth when I was a college student in Mysore and Bangalore in the Sixties when our lives had turned molten gold with Shanker-Jaikishen and OP Nayar and Rafi and Lata and Mukesh and all those lovely men and women of Hindi film music.

Jayachamaraja Wodeyar, the portly father of the present semi-portly parliamentary candidate Srikandadata Narasimharaja Wodeyar, was the king then. He was hardly in the news ever, if I remember right, except when his palaces were taken away by democracy and when every year on Dusserah he, himself suffocatingly decorated, somehow positioned himself on an over-decorated elephant and went in procession through the city. We were in the National Cadet Corp (NCC) then and marched along with him singing, whenever the under-officer wasn't in listening-range, under the baton of our sinful Kannadiga classmates an extremely unsavoury song about the king's bulk. Those were, oh, wicked times. And I know now from my late brother who was with the State Bank of Mysore that all those tonnes of gold and precious stones he wore were given to him just for that day from the bank's safe room where democracy had stowed it away, having extracted them from him in return for joining Bharatmata. My brother was among the bank officials who used to carry them to the palace in a police van.

Mysore is blazing hot as I head for the hotel Dasaprakash, as ancient as ever, as staid, unadorned and severe, and, in my opinion, still the finest place in Mysore to lay your head down if you are not glitterati or filthy-rich or both, whichever is worse. But where are the posters? And the banners? And the wall-writing? And the vehicles with loudspeakers screeching? I ask the autodriver: What happened to the elections? Sir, he says, the netas have agreed among themselves not to mess up the main roads and commercial centres with their election stuff; they do all that in the bylanes only. I almost take back the bad words I had used to describe Kannadiga politicians. But, I tell myself, no. One Mysore doesn't make a Karnataka election. In Bangalore, I had seen street-dancing and drum-beating party-men holding up traffic at the super-crowded city-hub, the Majestic Circle. And everywhere the entrenched Writing on the Wall.

Mysore is pretty much the same, it seems to me, after thirty three years. Even that maddening city scent remains the same in many places — a satanic brew pooled by jasmines, jackfruit, cow-dung, horse-urine, and coffee, with an added whiff of unbearably desiresome pakodas frying. And in this April month of our discontent, I stand there breathing in that heart-wrenching mixture of memory and desire filling the city.

Mysore is the same — except for the choking crowds. Sayaaji Rao road is spilling over with evening shoppers. Cheerful sex-workers stand around in corners and throw glances. As ever, women whose existence seems inexplicable sit under trees and on empty sidewalks, desultory, lost and in a haze of fatigue. The pavements are packed with stalls selling fly-by-night wares of assured dubiousness.

As I cross over to Devaraj Urs road, I see two solitary cut-outs, the only election-sign till now. One is of Wodeyar himself. He has been evidently on a thinning regime because a fat man's shadow still clings to him, proving the point, if you like, that in every thin man there's a fat man waiting to come out and vice versa. He wears designer dark glasses, is bald for his age which must be in the fifties and has on white socks which show through the stylish sandals. He has tied on a green-bordered white dhoti and put on a round-necked half-sleeved shirt which is see-through and doesn't suit him anyway. He has a worried look on his face. The drooping moustache somehow accentuates the anxious look. The other cut-out is of the Congress candidate for the assembly seat and he knows his job. He stands there all in white with folded hands and an ingratiating smile on his face.

It's dark and I walk over to the north gate of the palace, thinking how many years it took me to realise that the name Wodeyar is the same as Malayalam's Udayavar, meaning the one who owns. The Great Owner — the king. In fact, the language of classic Kannada poetry of the Middle Ages such as Akka Mahadevi's reads almost like present day Malayalam. It makes me think unpatriotically that Malayalam might have had two mothers: Tamil, the regular mother and Kannada. But Malayalis wouldn't want to admit we are Johnnies-come-lately.

As I stand before the closed gate and look towards the palace it suddenly hits me that the present Wodeyar must have been a kid when I was hunting life in these streets. I touch myself to see if I am real, or the narcissistically schizophrenic adolescent of 1961. Four temples guard the gate itself and there are lots of worshippers. Whether the king is popular or not his guardian gods and goddesses certainly are. Old men looking somewhat depressed are seated on various benches. Some old ladies are having a chatty gathering on plastic chairs. Beyond the gate, the palace stands lonely and grand and massive in a vast garden. Spotlights throw golden beams on its walls. A few windows are lit, may be for added effect. There is a large, solitary red light burning atop the top-most tower, signaling danger to whom, I wonder. The maharaja must be out campaigning. The royal family must be in there, hidden somewhere in the heart of that spectacle, surrounded by gazes like mine but unseen, watching TV or having a vada and dosa or trying to make love or any one of those humdrum things.

Next day I check out on Wodeyar's electoral fortunes. He has won four elections here but his vote-count has been steadily slipping. He won with a lead of just about 13000 votes in 1999, down from the 4 lakh in his first contest. His opponent is BJP's Vijayashankar whom he defeated last time. I ask my friend the eminent Kannada playwright Sivaprakash about Srikandadatta's chances. Siva takes a bleak view. He feels Wodeyar has been on a lark the last four years and has not done much for the constituency. Nor does he seem to have kept in touch with the people. He could be very much in trouble. But, Siva reminds me, the royal family still has a tremendous store of goodwill with the rural people, going back to the times when at the turn of the 20th century the Wodeyars showed willingness to modernise some of their ways.

I tell Siva about something that puzzles me. In the family portrait gallery at the palace, down through the 19th century I see a royalty who are slim, supple, hardy and spartanly rural. Not an inch of extra fat anywhere. The women may not have been pretty in today's sense but they had no-nonsense bodies. I stood before the portrait of the lady, Kempachalu-varujammanni, perhaps from the late 19th century, powerfully graceful as she half-leans on a table with a who-are-you look. A whiff of her extraterrestrial libido hits me on the solar plexus and I hold on to the wall. Is it the new foods and new lifestyles that have created the overweight problem, I ask. Or may be it's just that our maharajahs got to be very lazy as the British took over all the work.

I buy a Rs 20 ticket to walk through the gigantic silver, gold, rosewood and stained-glass palace with its astounding extravaganza of furniture and paraphernalia. Suddenly I realise: now you know why Karnataka has been so poor. You can't build palaces like this and keep the people fed and clothed. It's either/or.

It's a tiring nine hours by night bus to Mookambika, the famous forest temple of Devi Saraswati, in Dakshin Kannada District, off the western coast, beyond Udupi and Manipal. The Devi has a well-known soft corner for singers, artistes and such folk. But it's not the Kannadigas who exploit her grace but the wily Malayalis. From Yesudas to MT Vasudevan Nair to Mohan Lal to ... name the celebrity and he/she is a devotee.

Kannadigas just collect the moola. Malayalis have this special affinity because myth says the original non-resident Keralite missionary, Sankaracharya, founded the temple. I sit in one of the outer mandapams and watch the scintillating parade of Malayali Nair and Menon women glide by, sumptuous, regal, matriarchal and mouth-watering. I look for signs of the elections. Right in front of the main temple gate on the upper floor of a house a poster with the picture of Atal says: Vote BJP. That's that. As bells ring and lamps are lit, I lean back on the stone pillar and wonder: Who will the Devi vote for?

Paul Zacharia is a Kerala-based writer and columnist

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nascio

2011-11-23T11:23:00.001-08:00

on from the side of other
on equating religion with nation. Golwalker, Hitler or Maududi might be happy with such a proposition, not any person who has the
basic animal territorial sense, which nationalism is an expansion of
(Nation and nativity have the same geographic etymology: nascio,
meaning be born).

miss 3

2011-11-21T13:32:00.001-08:00

Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can't fool little boys and girls with such stuff — not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily.

some ben

2011-11-16T13:28:00.001-08:00

"The only way to deal with an un-free world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion", Albert Camus

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society", Krishnamurti

"Three passions have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind", Bertrand Russel

"Desire is half of life, indifference is half of death", Khalil Gibran

"The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything", Albert Einstein

"They can cut all the flowers, but they can't stop spring", Pablo Neruda

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed", Mahatma Gandhi

"In the name of the beautiful books I read
In the name of the kisses I kissed
May the army be defeated."
Aharon Shabtai

"Dance, as though no one is watching
Love, as though you've never been hurt before
Sing, as though no one can hear you
Work, as though you don't need the money
Live, as though heaven is on earth."
Jalaluddin Rumi

24-Hour Cycle

2011-11-14T23:31:00.001-08:00

"They'll say, this machine is good, but this one doesn't have enough water," she said. "Well, you have nightgowns in one and towels in another. Heavy clothes will absorb more water. They don't know what cycle. What clothes to put with what. They will put in way too much soap. If I see a washer and it's got 14 minutes left and there's too much soap, I'll put in fabric softener, which will cut it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/nyregion/17laundry.html?pagewanted=all

the insider

2011-11-07T11:34:00.001-08:00

A chief complaint is that reporters, eager for a story, take the words of lapsed members as gospel. Davis says Scientology gets little credit for the success of its social-betterment programs, which include Narconon and also literacy and educational programs. "Look around," says Davis. "People are out here busting their butt every day to make a difference. And one guy who leaves because he wants to go to the movies gets to characterize the whole organization? That sucks."

Scientologists do not look kindly on critics, particularly those who were once devout. Apostasy, which in Scientology means speaking out against the church in any public forum, is considered to be the highest form of treason. This is one of the most serious "suppressive acts," and those who apostatize are immediately branded as "Suppressive Persons," or SPs. Scientologists are taught that SPs are evil — Hitler was an SP, says Rinder. Indeed, Hubbard believed that a full 2.5 percent of the population was "suppressive." As he wrote in the Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dietionary, a suppressive person is someone who "goofs up or vilifies any effort to help anybody and particularly knife with violence anything calculated to make human beings more powerful or more intelligent."

hubba

2011-11-07T11:18:00.001-08:00

Hubbard also began to obsess over the forces he saw opposing him, including journalists, whom Hubbard long distrusted and even banned from ever becoming Scientologists. Worse still were psychiatrists, a group that, coupled with the pharmaceutical-drug industry — in Hubbard's words, a "front group" — operated "straight out of the terrorist textbooks," as he wrote in a 1969 essay titled "Today's Terrorism." He accused psychiatrists of kidnapping, torturing and murdering with impunity. "A psychiatrist," he wrote, "kills a young girl for sexual kicks, murders a dozen patients with an ice pick, castrates a hundred men."

To attack his enemies, Hubbard issued a policy known as "Fair Game," which maintained that all who opposed Scientology could be "tricked, sued or lied to and destroyed." This policy was enforced by Scientology's quasisecret police force, known as the Guardian's Office. By the 1970s, among its tasks was "Operation Snow White," a series of covert activities that included bugging the Justice Department and stealing documents from the IRS. (Scientology officials say Fair Game was canceled decades ago.)

thetan

2011-11-07T11:06:00.001-08:00

She admits this with embarrassment because Scientologists consider many illnesses to be psychosomatic and don't believe in treating them with medicine, even aspirin.

Like all Scientologists, Natalie considers her body to be simply a temporary vessel. She thinks of herself as an immortal being, or "thetan," which means that she has lived trillions of years, and will continue to be reborn, again and again. Many Eastern religions have similar beliefs, and Natalic is quick to note that Scientology is "actually a very basic religion. It has a lot of the same moral beliefs as others." What's special about Scientology, Natalie says, is that it "bears a workable applied technology that you can use in your everyday life."

"Technology," or "tech," is what Scientologists call the theories, methods and principles espoused by L. Ron Hubbard — "LRH," as Natalie calls him. To the devout, he is part prophet, part teacher, part savior — some Scientologists rank Hubbard's importance as greater than Christ's — and Hubbard's word is considered the word. Hubbard was a prolific writer all his life; there are millions of words credited to him, roughly a quarter-million of them contained within Dianetics, the best-selling quasiscientific self-help book that is the most famous Scientology text.

hankies

2011-11-07T10:39:00.001-08:00

The French sociologist Regis Dericquebourg, an expert in comparative religions, explains Scientology's belief system as one of "regressive utopia," in which man seeks to return to a once-perfect state through a variety of meticulous, and rigorous, processes intended to put him in touch with his primordial spirit.

Steve Jobs

2011-11-06T11:01:00.002-08:00

Similarly, I was very taken with the story of Steve, Andy Warhol, the Mac and the boy: "Older people sit down and ask, "What is it?", but the boy asks, "What can I do with it?" Reminiscent of Sugata Mitra and his Minimally Invasive Education.

Steve Jobs

2011-11-06T11:01:00.001-08:00

simply said

2011-11-05T03:39:00.001-07:00

I.B.M. did not design everything itself. In an effort to make an inexpensive machine that could get to market quickly, it used a microprocessor from Intel and operating system software from Microsoft.

The machine was a hit, making desktop computing acceptable to corporate America and becoming the industry standard.

But competitors realized they could essentially make copies of the machine using Intel chips and Microsoft software. The power in the computer industry shifted to Intel and Microsoft, and hardware became a low-price commodity. I.B.M. eventually sold its PC business and some other hardware operations, and now focuses on software and services.

The Art of Craft: The Rise of the Designer-Maker

2011-11-05T01:49:00.001-07:00

In his 2008 book The Craftsman, the sociologist Richard Sennett makes a case for homo faber (or "man as maker"). Harking back to the workshops of the medieval guilds and to the studio of violin-maker Antonio Stradivari, Sennett set out to prove Immanuel Kant's dictum that "the hand is the window on to the mind". It is only through making things, he says – by trying and failing and repeating – that we gain true understanding. He is not, like some latter-day John Ruskin, arguing that handmade things are better than machine-made ones. He is simply saying that skilled manual labour – or indeed any craft – is one path to a fulfilling life. S ennett's idea of a "craftsman" is highly inclusive, but, at least since the industrial revolution, the designer and the craftsman are traditionally different roles. In the world of the Fordist production line, the designer created the templates that industrial craftsmen would replicate in the hundreds or thousands. The conspicuous consumption that defined the second half of the 20th century was driven by mass production; by men (though not always men) in charge of machines. And what Karl Marx called "commodity fetishism" – that ineffable something that gives an object a perceived value greater than its actual material cost – is best exemplified by machinic perfection: the sheen on an iPad, the techno-treads of a Nike trainer. But it seems that increasingly we are swapping one fetish for another.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/01/rise-designer-maker-craftsman-handmade

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Born to Run [via longform.org]

2011-11-01T23:27:00.001-07:00

But their mindset was still that of the children of privilege. This foray into the workaday world was, as Barbara Bush said, an adventure. The prostitute might be staying in the shotgun digs in Odessa, but the Bushes would be moving on. It's difficult to overestimate the importance of knowing this: Real power to shape the future breeds optimism, which breeds effort, which breeds success.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR2006112700852_pf.html

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Born to Run [via longform.org]

2011-11-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

This is an uncomfortable turning of the reportorial tables, and I am less than eloquent. But in fits and starts I say that "social class" is all about family connections and money and expectations and training, and what those can mean. I say the sons of fathers in high-level jobs end up in high-level jobs about half the time, while the sons of manual workers end up in high-level jobs about 20 percent of the time. I say that social class shapes everything from our self-esteem to our child-rearing to our sense of control over our lives. I say that education is the great American leveler -- but that rich kids get more of it. And that families like the Bushes often send their kids to expensive private schools to ensure their leg up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR2006112700852_pf.html

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King of Kings [via longform.org]

2011-11-01T10:39:00.001-07:00

Recalcitrant students and political dissidents were picked up, tortured, given show trials, and either imprisoned or hanged. The hangings often took place on the grounds of universities, with fellow-students and parents forced to watch. An especially vivid and exemplary execution came in 1984, when a young man named Sadiq Hamed Shwehdi was tried in Benghazi's basketball stadium on charges of terrorism. Hundreds of schoolchildren were bused in to attend, and the trial was broadcast live on national television. Shwehdi, on his knees, wept as he confessed to joining the "stray dogs"—Qaddafi's term for his exiled opponents—while he was studying in the United States. A panel of revolutionary judges sentenced him to death, and he was led to a waiting gallows. Shwehdi hung from the noose, slowly strangling, until suddenly a young woman in an olive-green uniform, a "volunteer" named Huda Ben Amer, strode up and violently pulled on his legs. Qaddafi rewarded Ben Amer for her show of revolutionary zeal, and she later served two terms as the mayor of Benghazi

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/07/111107fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=all

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King of Kings [via longform.org]

2011-11-01T10:34:00.001-07:00

The Green Book rejected Communism and capitalism, claiming that both systems gave citizens an insufficient chance to share the country's wealth. As part of a sweeping economic reform, Qaddafi abolished personal property, and, in 1978, announced that all factories were being handed over to the workers. Regeb Misellati, the former head of the central bank, told me, "They changed the management, removing all the managers and replacing them with revolutionary committees; they also did this in schools and hospitals. This meant that, in some cases, orderlies were appointed as managers." Qaddafi used similarly disruptive tactics in politics, splitting Libya into ten administrative districts, then fifty-five, forty-eight, twenty-eight—each time with a complete purge of staff, so that no one except him could maintain authority for long.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/07/111107fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=all

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King of Kings [via longform.org]

2011-11-01T10:33:00.001-07:00

In a chapter about political organization, he proclaimed that "parliament is a misrepresentation of the people," and that the party system is a "contemporary form of dictatorship." He abolished both in Libya, and replaced them with a set of local people's committees, in which, hypothetically, everyone would participate. These smaller bodies would convey the will of the people to a General People's Congress. To affirm that the people were in control, Qaddafi narrowed his long list of official titles to just two: Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution. Qaddafi told Fallaci that he had created a state in which "there is no government, no parliament, no representation, no strikes, and everything is Jamahiriya." When she scoffed, he said, "Oh, how traditionalist you Westerners are. You only understand democracy, republic, old stuff like that. . . . Now humanity has passed to another stage and created Jamahiriya, which is the final solution."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/07/111107fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=all

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