Month: December 2010

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Cleveland Browns got one back in 1974 – let their reply be a lesson to you.

by Zoë Pollock

Dennis G. elaborates on an analogy made by Glenn Thrush, that Obama offends liberals like Bob Dylan offended folk-loving hippies when he went electric. Dennis defends both for their rock and roll attitude:

Dylan shocked these folksters when he plugged in an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.  … They did not hate the songs. They hated the way that Dylan presented the music. … Dylan had a very hard time accepting their rage as sensible on any level and from time to time he lashed out at them with comments that some folks today might call ‘attacking his base’. …

[T]ime proved Dylan right and the process outrage of the folksters just looks silly in retrospect. And two years into the Obama Administration I think the same can be said about all the process rage directed at President Obama.

by Zoë Pollock

Jen Paton considers what it means that Bradley Manning allegedly collected the Wikileaks data while rocking out to Lady Gaga:

[The seduction of audio is that it] represents a sort of personal branding of oneself to oneself: nobody knows what’s going on behind your ear buds – whether its Gaga or Genesis, NPR or Rush Limbaugh, you are performing yourself to yourself for yourself only.  That way the mask perhaps need never come off, one never need “be alone” with one’s thoughts.

There is some heady hubris that comes from setting your life to music: banal moments acquire emotional heft, and one’s dash to get a sandwich at lunch acquires some extra swagger. It’s a feeling most of us, in the past, could’ve only enjoyed in a clearly public space – the club – or a clearly private one – the car, your living room. Taking that purely private pleasure in public, but in secret, is a relatively new thing.

by Zoë Pollock

Andrew O'Hehir sums up my take on the Coen brothers' "True Grit, " which I saw last night, and puts it in perspective of their entirely impressive career:

With each new movie, [the Coen brothers] dive into a specific conception of genre and go all-out, striving to make it their own without violating its terms and conventions. If "A Serious Man" was a knotty, fatalistic Jewish fable, "Burn After Reading" was a spy farce and "No Country" was a dark-hearted, '70s-style neo-noir, then "True Grit" is a western in the John Ford style, informed by the ideology of Manifest Destiny and American Protestant conceptions of morality and justice. …

No one can tell you whether to like or dislike a film, of course, but I think grasping what the Coens are up to, in "True Grit" or anything else they've ever made, almost always requires multiple viewings. Form is content and meaning for them, which is why they resist talking about those things in isolation. To suggest that "True Grit" is a commentary about race and the social role of women and the relationship between self-reliance and community in American history is essentially to insult the Coens' intelligence, and yours. It's a western movie, which is a shorter way of saying all that stuff.

Or you could take the Sullivan route, as a reader pointed out, and say it features some pretty amazing beards and bears.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Here's one that caught my eye, published in the November 1936 magazine:

The most powerful man in America!

Who is he?

You and I. Our friends. Our neighbors. In other words, Mr. Average Citizen!

The only trouble is, he frequently fails to realize his own strength. He allows himself to be bullied, led, and tricked, and when he realizes it, is inclined to say: "But what can I do about it?"

Take, for instance, this absurd business of war. He doesn't want war. He doesn't want to give up his job, leave his wife and youngsters, live like an animal in trenches and be shot at like an animal by Average Citizens of another country.

Yet he does all this. He fights wars created by Far-from-Average Citizens who do not give up their jobs, do not leave their wives and youngsters, do not get shot at. Peace is something to fight for: war is something to fight against. So, Mr. Average Citizen, wield that tremendous power of yours! Let jingoistic politicians, big-navy lobbies, war-fomenting papers, feel the might of your wrath.

Today with talk of another war heard everywhere, Americans must stand firm in their determination that the folly of 1914-1918 shall not occur again. World Peaceways, a non-profit organization for public enlightenment on international affairs, feels that intelligent efforts can and must be made toward a secure peace. To this end you can do your share to build up a strong public opinion against war. Write today to World Peaceways, 103 Park Avenue, New York City.

by Conor Friedersdorf

An essay by Andre Glucksmann celebrates their audacity:

The Athenians demonstrated incredible audacity in affirming that human freedom must be understood without the gods, who are held not to be implicated in human affairs—no longer at the helm, so to speak. That affirmation is the source of philosophy, as we learn from Plato’s Apology. Socrates was “the wisest of men,” announced the Delphic oracle. Perplexed, Socrates neither affirmed nor denied this, but began an inquiry…

He questioned all claims to knowledge, whether religious, sophistic, traditional, or moral, including those concerning the ultimate ends of the community, which everyone claimed to know, even though they only approached such subjects superficially or arbitrarily. Socrates popped the mental bubbles that imprisoned those who claimed, with arrogant certainty, to possess absolute knowledge… Socrates’s uncertainty revealed a rupture that gave birth to philosophy. The divine word is a mystery; it can mean everything or nothing. Zeus neither speaks nor holds his tongue but makes a sign, as Heraclitus said. Man discovers that he himself is responsible for giving meaning to this sign. The word from above, or from elsewhere, must be deciphered. This is the Greek genius: the separation of heaven and earth.

by Zoë Pollock

Adam Gopnik ruminates on the snowflake, and how we've imprinted our own neuroses on them over time:

 In 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—let’s not defund it) took a plane up into the clouds over Wisconsin and found two simple but identical snow crystals, hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one twin to another, as Cole Sprouse is like Dylan Sprouse. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike; they usually start out more or less the same.

Yet if this notion threatens to be depressing—with the suggestion that only the happy eye of nineteenth-century optimism saw special individuality here—one last burst of searching and learning puts a brighter seasonal spin on things. “As a snowflake falls, it tumbles through many different environments,” an Australian science writer named Karl Kruszelnicki explains. “So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc, that it has experienced on the way.” Snowflakes start off all alike; their different shapes are owed to their different lives.

(Image from Westport, Connecticut, where much of the northeast has been hit by snowstorm, by Spencer Platt/Getty.)

by Conor Friedersdorf

In the LA Times, Neal Gabler complains about the left's evolution:

In the days of FDR, the Democratic Party, despite its factions and disagreements, coalesced around one overriding tenet: muscular government action, especially in behalf of the powerless. After FDR, Democratic presidential nominees Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and even the much-maligned George McGovern and Walter Mondale subscribed to this liberal ideal without apology. Belief in the efficacy of government was a prerequisite to gaining the nomination. Democratic aspirants didn't lurch rightward or pray for common ground. They stood and fell on principle. But that was then. The fact is that nowadays you don't get the Democratic presidential nomination unless you are willing to soft-pedal activist liberalism…

That's because sometime in the 1970s, the Democratic Party became basically an "interests" party. It stopped pressing government action as an overriding binding principle and began instead to appeal to individual interest groups: African Americans, Hispanics, women, labor, gays, youth and even Blue Dogs.

Perhaps the real reason Democrats stopped unapologetically advocating for muscular government action to solve every problem – or at least why most of them did – is that the resulting policies didn't always work. And how could they? There is no single approach to policy that comes out right every time. Liberals at their best see government performance as it is, not as ideologues wish it to be.

by Chris Bodenner

Snowmageddon descends on Belmar, New Jersey, which got slammed with 32 inches:

Fortunately I'm safely on semi-vacation out in the rainy PNW, but a friend forwarded a photo from the tundra on my street in South Slope, Brooklyn (several other NYC reader submissions after the jump as well):

From Midtown:

This one from Queens is a Window View in its own right:

And lastly, from the East Village:

by Zoë Pollock

A new blog for When Parents Text. I enjoy the super subtle ones:

I had a dream about rescuing a kitten last nite which I believe reflects my desire to be a grandmother someday