Month: April 2011

And comes away liking him. Neil Strauss, author of The Game, describes feeling like he's at "the center of a men's support group":

You know the Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex? I wanted to do the equivalent for male sexuality. On some levels male sexuality is everywhere in society, but on the other hand it's completely repressed: Men are afraid to show it because it will make them socially unacceptable as well as less sexually desirable. I wanted to write something that was honest about male sexuality, not like Maxim magazine or the billboards.

San Francisco, California, 5.43 pm

Mélanie Berliet interviews Eddie Einbinder, the author of How To Have Fun And Not Die:

I thought to myself, why haven’t I Googled “most common ways kids are going to die today,” and put it up on my fridge? I was right that there are some blanket rules that can seriously up your odds of surviving. If you can take one sentence from the lecture I give, it should be that the vast majority of overdoses result from two or more substances at once in your body. That right there, on top of keeping in mind that what’s billed as either heroin or coke or ecstasy includes multiple substances—whatever they’re cut with for profit—is key.

When people do a drug respectfully, in the way it’s meant to be done, they rarely die.

"Inshallah" by Ben Downing appeared in The Atlantic in March of 2000:

— which is to say "God willing," more or less:
a phrase that rose routinely to her lips
whenever plans were hatched or hopes expressed,
the way we knock on wood, yet fervently,
as if to wax too confident might be
to kill the very thing she wanted most.

It used to pique and trouble me somehow,
this precautionary tic of hers, but now
I understand why she was skeptical
of what Allah in His caprice allots,
because that she should live He did not will
or, more terribly, He did that she should not.

in memoriam Mirel Sayinsoy 1967-1999

(Photo: A Libyan woman has her face covered with French flag colours while holding the rebellion flag, as she attends the Friday noon prayer in Benghazi on March 25, 2011. By Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images)

Leo Benedictus defends e-readers:

When the children of 2011 look back, they will not see this as the year their local libraries were taken away. This will be the year they all got libraries of their own.

A member of the English Defence League (EDL) wears a mock burka as the EDL gather for a demonstration against radical Islamism on April 2, 2011 in Blackburn, England. Around two thousand members of the EDL gathered in the centre of Blackburn as an opposing demonstration by anti-fascists held their protest nearby. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

Mickey Edwards joins the chorus:

The "I'm King" scenario is bad enough, but Obama also has a second story available if we're not ready to buy that one. In this tale, Obama acted not as a king, but under the authority granted to him by the United Nations Security Council. But while the Founders had their disagreements, none ever envisioned that the question of whether or not to send Americans on a military mission would be left up to other nations. Obama assumed authority for the Libyan adventure on two false premises, not one.

Charlie Savage has, however, defused one of the more outrageous claims for presidential authority allegedly made by secretary of state Clinton, first reported at TPM:

In a phone interview, Mr. Sherman said that he had actually asked whether the administration believed it was bound to obey the 60-day deadline. And Mrs. Clinton gave no definitive response either way, he said. “Everything I heard about the War Powers Act was evasive and vague,” Mr. Sherman said, adding that Mrs. Clinton had also sidestepped questions by other lawmakers in the briefing.

Mrs. Clinton’s demurral, he also said, was essentially identical to the public performance of the Deputy Secretary of State, James B. Steinberg, when Mr. Sherman asked him the same question at an unclassified hearing on Thursday.

In that exchange (which starts at the 5:29 mark of this clip), Mr. Sherman repeatedly pressed Mr. Steinberg to say whether the administration will comply with the 60-day provision. Mr. Steinberg tried various ways to avoid answering the question, ultimately saying “it’s a question that cannot be answered in the abstract.”

The dead keep getting outed:

Malcolm X himself contributed to many of the fictions, Mr. Marable argues, by exaggerating, glossing over or omitting important incidents in his life. These episodes include a criminal career far more modest than he claimed, an early homosexual relationship with a white businessman, his mother’s confinement in a mental hospital for nearly 25 years and secret meetings with leaders of groups as divergent as the Ku Klux Klan and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Of course, the evidence of Malcolm X's heterosexuality is in the children he bore. But how many straight black men do you know who have had a sexual and emotional relationship with a white businessman?

A reader writes:

My friend Bob directed this music video for New Orleans genderqueer rapper Big Freedia. Dunno if you've heard about her; she is leading this "sissy bounce" movement down there. It's pretty cool video. Bob also developed the technology called "datamoshing", which he pioneered in a Chairlift video and was later used by Kanye West.

Ian Bogost regrets that ideas get buried too quickly on blogs and that we sometimes miss important exchanges. Alan Jacobs takes it one step further:

Blogs are very poor tools for fostering genuine intellectual exchange, which is one reason why, increasingly, those exchanges happen for many on Twitter — despite the 140-character-at-a-time limit. We might ask why that is: Why do some many people prefer to exchange ideas on Twitter rather than on blogs? I don't think it’s just laziness. And then we might ask another question: What might a tool look like that combines the best features of blogging and tweeting, while minimizing the flaws of both instruments?