February 2009
44 posts
January 2009
36 posts
Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test : NPR →
John Maynard Keynes is an unlikely hero for our time.
Keynes, a British economist who died more than 60 years ago, inspired President Barack Obama’s plan to save the U.S. economy with a massive round of government spending. The British economist published his big theory, the one underpinning most of what Obama intends to do, in 1936.
A Final, Epic Work From Roberto Bolaño : NPR →
Roberto Bolano’s 2666 is at once a novel and an international literary event. The United States took a while to clue into a writer who’s been internationally hailed as one of the very best of our era, if not the second coming of Jorge Luis Borges. But America’s paucity of publishers (and readers) willing to publish (and read) works in translation slowed down our appreciation of...
American Gorbachev | n+1 →
The America our new president inherits bears an uncanny resemblance to our old enemy, the Soviet Union—right before it went under. Our country’s paranoia and stubbornness have secured us indifferent allies and intractable commitments. Not only is there Afghanistan—still Afghanistan—where we fight the same enemy we once created to bleed the Russians, but just to show that we can do everything...
The First Five Days
“Hot damn. We’d all hoped that Obama would get some shit done, but what, we’re two days into his administration and he’s already stopped Guantanamo show trials, ordered Guantanamo closed, banned torture, ordered a full review of U.S. detention policies and procedures, repealed the Global Gag Rule, clearly stated his support for Roe v. Wade, and gotten started on an...
“People Got a Lotta Nerve” by Neko...
Book Review - 'A Day and a Night and a Day,' by... →
The phrase “a day and a night and a day” appears in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Steinbeck’s protagonist, Ethan Hawley, a veteran of World War II, uses it to refer to a space of time that is “all one piece, one unit of which the parts were just about all the dirty dreadfulness that can happen in that sick business.” He can’t get the horror of that “sick business” out of...
Computers Track the Elusive Metaphor - The... →
Aristotle was famous for his love of metaphors and applauded writers who could harness their power. Having command over metaphors could not be taught or “imparted by another,” he wrote. “It is the mark of genius.”
Some 2,400 years later, computers may not be able to master poetics like Aristotle, but they have become smart enough to know a metaphor when they see one.
An...
Edgar Allan Poe at 200 - NYTimes.com →
Edgar Allan Poe reaches his second century mark today. The young United States was a strange place for literary genius to develop, and Poe’s career was relatively short (he died at 40, on Oct. 7, 1849), but through his works he inspired generations of writers throughout the world, and there has been no letup in the 21st century.
To celebrate the occasion here is a slide show of Poe works and...
Obamanaugural: Top Ten Moments of Obama's... →
msannethrope:
Would you like a day’s worth of American Promise and Democracy summed up in ten brief internet videos?
Happy Inauguration Day!
“I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the...”
“For two years now the epithet “historic” has been affixed to Barack Obama —...”
– Up Front - The Inauguration Issue - NYTimes.com
"Live As Domestic A Life As Possible": A Female... →
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s proto-feminist horror novella The Yellow Wallpaper is about to be re-released, prompting the Telegraph’s Justine Picardie to examine her painful and sometimes inspiring life.
“There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve” from...
Beware of Pity: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker →
Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal
by Adam Kirsch
The Hunger Artist—By Scott Horton (Harper's... →
In today’s New York Times Adam Nossiter gives us the story of Greg Bartlett, the sheriff of Morgan County, Alabama, now ordered to jail by the state’s most senior federal judge, civil rights lion U.W. Clemon. The sheriff had been starving his inmates in order to line his own wallet: enriching himself by $212,000 that he saved from funds destined to feed his inmates. Now Bartlett will have to make...
Living With Music: Madison Smartt Bell - Paper... →
Rebel Music Old and New
I started listening to most of this music in the early 1990s, as I was finishing the first of what would be three long novels about revolutionary events a long time ago in a small obscure place that few people in the United States had heard of and fewer cared about. What’s different now? At least a few more people are aware that Haiti, and the conditions of living in...
Ladies And Gentlemen, Senator Al Franken →
As a one-time resident. I’m thrilled. As a born Southerner, it’s kind of affirming that the elections process is horribly fucked up everywhere in our nation, although my Midwestern friends (who are quick to point to the Florida debacle and continued racially and economically based voter disenfranchisement down here, even in this most recent Presidential election) are no doubt finding...
“…if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else...”
– Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room. (via rach)
French anarchists arrested - is Tarnac a rural... →
Police in balaclavas vs. farmers and a distinguished clarinettist…who’s acting like terrorists, again?
High on a bleak mountain plateau in central France, the tiny village of Tarnac is fiercely proud of its grocer’s shop. A smiling lady with a perm stands behind the old-fashioned till amid shelves stocked with everything from fly-swats and fairy lights to socks and soya milk....
