February 2012
24 posts
Inside Neko Case's Vermont Farmhouse →
By Katy McColl (via Country Living)
Leave the McMansions to run-of-the-mill rock stars. Indie musician Neko Case put her inimitable stamp on a historic Vermont farm, with quirky salvage, bold new finds, and more than a few heirloom seeds.
By The Piano
Rarely do the terms “rock star” and “homebody” describe the same person. Then again, Neko Case is far from your...
The Believer Interview - Joan Didion →
One Thursday at noon in December 2011, I spoke to Joan Didion over the phone. She was in a hotel in Washington. The woman at the front desk asked, “Who do you want? Bibion? B as in boy?” I replied, “No, d as in dog,” feeling weird and a little hostile. “D as in dog, i, d as in dog, i, o, n.” I did not like having to put dog in Joan Didion’s name. And I did not want to speak to Joan Bibion.
...
Post-Crash Fascism
PHOTO: STEVEN MEISEL / VOGUE ITALIA
by Christian Parenti (via Adbusters)
Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers and incrementally rising sea levels.
The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that...
Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen in 2012.
Photograph by Joel Saget/Getty Images.
By Jan Swafford (via Slate)
Check out our Spotify playlist of the Leonard Cohen songs discussed in this essay. Leonard Cohen has a new album out: Old Ideas, his 12th, and his first in seven years. He’s 77 now, and if you know Cohen you know his age will get its due in the new songs. The...
Watch
Death penalty case puts racism on trial in North... →
By Kate Dailey (via BBC News)
Photo: Judge Gregory Weeks presides over the hearing in North Carolina’s Cumberland County
In North Carolina, the Racial Justice Act seeks to remedy years of inequity on death row. But can racism be regulated?
In 1991, 18-year-old Marcus Reymond Robinson and a friend convinced Erik Tornblom, 17, to give them a ride home from a gas station.
Robinson and...
Why Lana Del Rey Scares Rock's Boys Club →
by Liz Phair (via The Wall Street Journal)
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
Rolling Stone asked me to speak about Lana Del Rey. I wanted to know how big my participation in the piece would be–was it substantial or just a quote? Just a quote, they said, to which I replied that I wasn’t super interested. Which was a lie. I have a lot to say about her, but no sound bites. You see, Lana Del Rey is exactly...
Total Incarceration →
In American prisons scattered across the various countries of the world, but outside the United States, prisoners are regularly raped, hung from hooks, subjected to waterboarding, burned, attached to electrodes, deprived of food, water or medicine, attacked by dogs, or beaten until their bones are broken. When on American military bases or on American territory, they are subjected to sensory...
WatchIn December 2011, leaders from around the world gathered at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations meeting in Doha, a forum meant to encourage dialogue between cultures and people.
The host nation, Qatar, asked Vangelis, the Greek composer, to create the music for the event, which also marked the inauguration of Doha’s cultural village and Greek-style amphitheatre. The event brought...
Sharon Van Etten was once an aspiring songwriter in Tennessee, but she had no idea how the music industry worked. So she moved to New York City and took an unpaid internship working for a record label.
“I started doing mail orders and then learned my way around the music blogs,” Van Etten says in an interview with Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “I didn’t...
A Glimpse Behind Bars: Juveniles In The Justice...
by Dana Farrington (via NPR)
Photo: Richard Ross/Juvenile In Justice
This 10-year-old, R., was brought in from school by a policeman. He had stabbed a schoolmate, but it was unclear what tool he had used. He was waiting to be picked up by his mom, who couldn’t get him until she got off work, for fear of losing her job.
In the confines of jail cells, photographer Richard Ross...
Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012: The Szymborska Poem... →
by Dana Stevens (via Slate)
For over seven years, since tearing it out of a December 2004 issue of the New Yorker,I’ve had the same Wislawa Szymborska poem taped up above my desk. Here it is*:
ABC
I’ll never find out now What A. thought of me. If B. ever forgave me in the end. Why C. pretended everything was fine. What part D. played in E.’s silence. What F. had been expecting, if...
January 2012
33 posts
“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Raise the Crime Rate →
by Christopher Glazek (via n+1)
Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the...
WatchBy Jon Schober and Mark Wheat
Poliça had already recorded its first full-length album before making its live debut locally. So the mystery behind the band after its inaugural show in September 2011 was already remarkably large — especially considering the musicians’ previous projects, which include Roma di Luna, Bon Iver and Gayngs.
Featuring Channy Leaneagh, Chris Bierden, Drew...
Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns: PRISONS AND... →
loneberry:
Loïc Wacquant article “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” gives a good historical/theoretical overview of the “peculiar” institutions that have operated to “define, confine, and control” black Americans in the United States.
The trajectory of these institutions might look something like this:
Philosophy and Addiction →
by Peg O’Connor (via The New York Times)
Philosophy is one of the oldest areas of inquiry. Out of control behavior fueled by alcohol and other drugs is one of the world’s oldest problems. What could these old timers offer each other? Philosophy has a long, stable relationship with reason and more specifically, the relationship between reason, emotions and the will. Addiction seems to...
“Who hasn’t asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”
– Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (via millionsmillions)
(via awritersruminations)
International Comparisons on Social Justice... →
by Lisa Wade (via Sociological Images)
How does the U.S. compare to other developed countries on measures of social justice? According to the New York Times, not very well. The visual below compares countries’ poverty rates, poverty prevention measures, income inequality, spending on pre-primary education, and citizen health. The “overall” rating is on the far left and the U.S. ranks 27th out...
Where to Strike Next? An interview with Raoul... →
Image: Paris, May 6, 1968. Violent clashes with students.
Situationist thinking defined the 1968 Paris Spring; a spontaneous uprising that nearly toppled the French government and threatened to erupt into a global insurrection against capitalism from within. Protesting alienation, inequality and society of the spectacle, slogans like “Boredom is counterrevolutionary” and “Run, comrade, the...
'Holiday': The Godfather Of Hip-Hop's Last Gift →
by Michael Schaub (via NPR)
“There ain’t no peace on earth, man,” sang Gil Scott-Heron on his legendary 1971 album Pieces of a Man. “Maybe peace when you die.” The groundbreaking jazz musician and poet was only 22 when he recorded those lines, but he seemed to know what lay ahead: While his brilliant career would forever change the face of American music, he spent...
“Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to...”
– Sigmund Freud
Occupy and Space →
by Astra Taylor (via n+1)
Even before Liberty Plaza was raided, many of us were asking what was next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement, we said, was about more than holding a space, even one in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. Occupation, I often heard, was a means, not an end; a tactic, not a target. The goal, from the beginning, was to do more than build an outdoor urban...