There is an interesting discussion of conservative politics going on at Slate by Sean Wilentz, author for The Age of Reagan, and Tim Naftali, author of George H. W. Bush.
Matt Gross, The NY Times' Frugal Traveler, continues his Grand Tour of Europe every Thursday, this week in Southern France.
I also always enjoy listening to The Cultural Gabfest at Slate.
On a related note, I've enjoyed Salon's Critics Picks, the May 31st edition inspired me to see the documentary film, Joy Division.
Between Ronald Reagan's last year of presidential office in 1989 and his death in 2004, a strange transformation took place within the Washington Post. I only noticed when, in a fit of masochism, I began to plow through the paper's coverage of Reagan's state funeral. As expected, there were the usual encomiums from Krauthammer and Will and Novak -- no different in kind than what they'd been churning out for a quarter-century -- but where was the other side? After decades of antagonism to Republican presidents in general and Reagan in particular, Post reporters, analysts, columnists and editorialists were sprinting -- practically elbowing each other out of the way -- to apotheosize a man they had never even liked, let alone endorsed.
I finally had to call my brother in Chicago and ask: "When did Reagan stop sucking?"
There a couple of interesting articles about China recently in The New Yorker. Ian Buruma looks at some books that pose the question whether or not the West is being overtaken by the East:
Every so often, a grand thesis captures the world’s imagination, at least until it is swept away by events or by a newer, more plausible thesis. The latest one to do so, in policy think tanks, universities, foreign ministries, corporate boardrooms, editorial offices, and international conference centers, is that America’s time of global dominance is finished, and that new powers, such as China, India, and Russia, are poised to take over. It’s an idea that has had as much currency within the United States as elsewhere.All great empires set too much store by predictions of their imminent demise. Perhaps, as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy suggested in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” empires need the sense of peril to give them a reason to go on. Why spend so much money and effort if not to keep the barbarians at bay?
In Evan Osnos' Letter From China, he looks at the phenomena that is Crazy English:
Accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant, Li Yang stepped into a Beijing classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English, wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a black car coat. His hair was set off by a faint silver streak. It was January, and Day Five of China’s first official English-language intensive-training camp for volunteers to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Li was making the rounds. The classes were part of a campaign that is more ambitious than anything previous Olympic host cities have attempted. China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”
Yet another amusing anecdote by David Sedaris in The New Yorker:
When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. Then I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but, still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.
There was an interesting essay in March's Harper's magazine, The Fear of Fallowing: The Specter of a No-Growth World by Steven Soll who discussed three book about economics. I found his discussion of Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future particularly interesting. I always wondered why economies "had" to grow, why not become more efficient-like the idea that Japan's population decreasing means that they have to let people immigrate to continue their economic production,why not scale back or get more efficient? Soll states:
McKibben believes that we can thrive, not just survive, without growth. The view may not be popular, but it is gaining. Robert Solow, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987 for innovations in growth theory, now calls himself "agnostic" as to whether growth can continue, and is cheerfully willing to contemplate a zero-growth economy. As Solow said to me, "There is no reason at all why capitalism could not survive without slow or even no growth. I think it's perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever." This does not mean that productivity wil ceas to increase our quality of life; it means that people might find it increasingly costly to turn productivity into the kinds of things they are now accustomed to buying with their earnings. "It is possible," says Solow, "that the United States and Europe will find that, as the decades go by, either continued growth will too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources, or that they would rather use increasing productivity in the form of leisure. There is nothing intrinsic in the systems that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state."
In Slate Jeff Greenfield entertaining explains about how certain political personalities take on the characteristics of the unflappable Bugs Bunny and unhinged Daffy Duck, it has a lesson for Hillary Clinton:
How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?There's no unified field theory that answers this question: You can give more or less weight to Obama's political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton's big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here's another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.
As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones—he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities—Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries. Sometimes he is glimpsed with his elbow on the fireplace mantel of his remarkably well-appointed lair, clad in a smoking jacket. (Jones once said Cary Grant was his inspiration for Bugs. Today it would be George Clooney.) Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor. When he is pushed too far and must respond, he borrows a quip from Groucho Marx: "Of course, you realize this means war." And then, whether his foe is hapless hunter Elmer Fudd, varmint-shooting Yosemite Sam, or a raging bull, Bugs always prevails.
Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer ("Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!"). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them. In one classic duel with Bugs, the two try to persuade Elmer Fudd to shoot the other—until Daffy, tricked by Bugs' wordplay, screams, "Shoot me now!"
In a separate video post at Slate Hillary is compared to the plucky female lead, Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon in Alexander Payne's underrated Election:
There's an essay by Chuck Klosterman in The Believer magazine available for free on line, here's an excerpt:
I drove a car across the country once. It took three weeks and was financed by a rock magazine. Two years after the trip, a handful of people from California with exceptionally comfortable office chairs considered making a movie out of my experience. It was a very confusing process. Enthusiastic strangers with German eyeglasses kept asking me how I imagined this film would look, which I found difficult to elucidate; I assumed it would look like the video for Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” partially because of the lyrical content but mostly because I (sort of) looked Canadian before I grew a beard. That was not the answer they were anticipating. I was given a strong impression they were hoping I would say it would be a lot like Trainspotting, although maybe they were just trying to figure out if I could put them in contact with local drug dealers. They also wanted me to sign a 780-page contract that would give time control over my “life rights,” which meant they would have been able to make me an ancillary character in You, Me and Dupree.My theoretical Road Movie would not have been interesting and does not exist, although those two points are not necessarily related. I have no doubt that it would have followed the conventional Road Movie trajectory, which has remained intact since before The Wizard of Oz. This trajectory is as follows:
A character experiences abstract loss and attempts an exodus from normal life. The character reinvents his or her self-identity while traveling. Along the way, the character encounters iconic individuals who (usually) illustrate authenticity and desolation. Upon the recognition of seemingly self-evident realizations, the character desires to return to the point of origin.
Here's an interesting little picture presentation from Slate:
One night and one roll of film. Chien-Chi Chang's photographs of "a night in a karaoke bar" explore a different scene from that which we are used to in Western karaoke establishments.He evocatively captures the other side of karaoke culture, in which divorced or married Vietnamese women entertain Taiwanese men, portraying what some suggest is a new "concubine phenomenon" emerging from karaoke culture in certain parts of Asia.
Andrew Leonard of Salon has an interesting post on Robert Kaplan's latest reportage about he effects of global warming in Bangladesh and America's lack of leadership in the global warming plight:
Robert Kaplan goes to Bangladesh for the Atlantic, and sees some scary things. At the top of the list, naturally, is the prospect for "one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in history," as climate change wreaks havoc on a nation where a population half as large as the United States is squeezed into a territory about the size of Iowa.And as if that wasn't enough, there's a war-on-terror angle.
Here is how global warming indirectly feeds Islamic extremism. As rural Bangladeshis flee a countryside ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest, they are migrating to cities at a rate of 3 to 4 percent a year. Swept into the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments, they lose their local and extended-family links, becoming more susceptible to a form of Islam with a sharper ideological edge. "We will not have anarchy at the village level, where society is healthy," warns Atiq Rahman. "But we can have it in the ever-enlarging urban areas." Such is the weakness of central authority in Bangladesh following 15 years of elected governments.How the World Works could not agree more with Kaplan's observation that American intransigence on global warming is a bad public relations move in a world where the countries that will pay the biggest price for climate change are also the countries that have done the least to bring it about. As Spiegel Online reported in May, "the average Bangladeshi produces just 178 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year -- a mere drop in the bucket compared to the 21 tons per capita released annually by Americans." The consequences of global warming entail rising anti-American sentiment as well as rising sea levels.
But packed within that one paragraph from Kaplan are invocations of some long-standing themes that we have come to count on from the man whom one critic calls "the monopolist of doom." The impotence of democracy. The coming anarchy. A tension between urban chaos and rural traditional values.
In a world where everything is falling apart, global warming is just one more stress fracture.
In a generally admiring profile of Kaplan written for Salon in 2001, well before he had made himself so obviously comfortable in the trappings of American neo-imperialism, Laura Rozen summarized Kaplan's worldview:
We are heading toward the apocalypse, and there is no deliverance."I would be unfaithful to my experience if I thought we had a general solution to these problems," Kaplan writes in "The Ends of the Earth." "We are not in control. As societies grow more populous and complex, the idea that a global elite like the U.N. can engineer reality from above is just as absurd as the idea that political 'scientists' can reduce any of this to a science. In an age of localized mini-holocausts, decisive action in one sphere will not necessarily help the victims in another. Only in a few cases will an organization like the U.N. make a truly pivotal difference."
But isn't the real tragedy that mitigating climate change could be one of those cases, if the United States threw the full weight of is authority and power behind it? Instead of fighting endless wars against extremist Islam whose only tangible result appears to be raising the overall temperature of global discord?
Here's a link to the Kaplan piece in Atlantic Monthly.
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