Month: May 2012

Can make a big difference:

Looking to draw some attention to her primary school’s poor excuses for lunches, 9-year-old Martha Payne of Argyll, Scotland, started a blog with her dad to rate the dinners (as they’re known across the pond) by taste, health, and “pieces of hair.” Starting out with an appetite-dismissing compartment plate consisting of a pizza, a solitary croquette, and a sprinkling of corn niblets, Martha’s blog quickly “went viral” thanks in no small part to celebrity chef and healthy school meal crusader Jamie Oliver, who took notice of her project and sent her his love via Twitter.

(Images: Examples of Martha’s school lunches before and after her blog forced the local school council to implement changes.)

Farhad Manjoo finds it:

Facebook’s IPO—like that of LinkedIn and Zynga—represents a massive transfer of wealth from Wall Street to the Valley. In my book, the money’s better off here than there. Yes, there’s a good chance that all this wealth will inflate a bubble in tech, leading to the funding of many less-than-stellar startups that wouldn’t have been created in leaner times. So what, though? You don’t get advances without a lot of failures, and in general, the winners will beat the losers. The last tech bubble produced Pets.com, but it also gave us Amazon, eBay, and PayPal. What’s more, people who made their money in those companies went on to fund the Valley’s latest crop of pioneering firms.

Forrest Wickman thinks Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe" might be the song of the summer: 

In this supercut from Popdust, the song gets covered by what appears to be a good chunk of North America.

Clay Risen raises a new objection to Williamson’s essay:

[Williamson] ignores, or isn’t aware of, the fascinating recent historical work that demonstrates how race and class in the postwar South were complementary, not mutually exclusive.

As Princeton’s Kevin Kruse demonstrates in his seminal history of postwar Atlanta, White Flight, the rising income among whites allowed overt racism to morph into something more subtle, from dominance through social control to dominance through space—in other words, whites just moved to the suburbs, where high property values proved just as effective as Jim Crow in keeping blacks at arm’s length. The new breed of conservative Republican politicians, in turn, realized they could avoid the stain of overt racism by appealing to these middle–class, de facto segregationists: hence the rise of anti?bussing, anti?urban politics in the 1970s and 80s, campaigns in which the words “black” and “segregation” never needed to be mentioned. Any serious discussion of race and American party politics needs to at least engage with such work. Williamson doesn’t.

You can listen to a radio interview with Joe McGinniss in Australia here. It's an interview that would not happen in the US because the journalists here believe in deference to politicians. It was on one of the biggest talk radio shows in the country. And they talked Trig for the last quarter of the interview.

Isaac Chotiner has a lovely review of P.G. Wodehouse's letters in the Atlantic. Wodehouse was in his country house in France when the Second World War broke out and failed to see the seriousness of the situation. He ended up interned in Poland, prompting the priceless remark that "If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like…" and then agreed to give some readings on Nazi radio about his life as an internee. The English never forgave him. But his propaganda was sly. One talk began:

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, “How can I become an Internee?” Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.

Isaac explores further:

Wodehouse’s remarks about fascism in his letters are typically dressed up in his language of choice (Hitler is called a "swine"), and—even if he was in plenty of good (or rather bad) company—he sometimes underestimated the threat of war until frightfully late in the 1930s. But he does seem to have diagnosed the menace beneath fascism’s bluster. Here he is in a letter from 1939:

The ghastly thing is that it’s all so frightfully funny. I mean, Hitler asking the little nations if they think they are in danger of being attacked. I wish one of them would come right out and say "Yes, we jolly well do!"

That this same man went along with the German government’s propaganda efforts shows that his comic gifts were matched only by—indeed, were built on—his penchant for repressing unpleasantness.

This deeply English impulse can be dismissed as frivolous, given the evil Britain faced. But the one thing fascism cannot bear is ridicule and humor. This deft avoidance of the humorless logic upon which most tyrannies rely is a very resilient form of resistance. So are the names Pongo Twistleton, Boko Fittleworth, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Stilton Cheesewright, J. Chichester Clam, and Cyril Bassington-Bassington.

Time waster bonus: a web page that generates endless Wodehouse quotes. I just came up with this one:

"How much did gin did you put in the jug?''
"A liberal tumblerful, sir.''
"Would that be a normal dose for an adult defeatist, do you think?''

No surprise that Hitch had two books by his side before he died: Larkin and Wodehouse. I suspect he'd be rather proud of his young friend Isaac's essay.

Amy Wallace marks D’Angelo's return to music-making after years of addiction. Besides drugs, he battled self-image issues, which were inflamed by fans shouting at him to strip after the release of the above video:

D’Angelo felt tortured, Questlove says, by the pressure to give the audience what it wanted. Worried that he didn’t look as cut as he did in the video, he’d delay shows to do stomach crunches. He’d often give in, peeling off his shirt, but he resented being reduced to that. Wasn’t he an artist? Couldn’t the audience hear the power of his music and value him for that? He would explode, Questlove recalls, and throw things. Sometimes he’d have to be coaxed not to cancel shows altogether. When I ask D about this, he downplays his suffering. Watching him pull hard on another Newport, I realize that he finds it far easier to confess his addictions than his insecurities about his corporeal self. Self-destructing with a coke spoon—while ill-advised—has a badass edge. Fretting over what Questlove has called “some Kate Moss shit” seems anything but manly …

Live by the six-pack; die by it. He needn't have made a video that shows him starkers. Alyssa Rosenberg is fascinated by the gender reversal. Dan Solomon has seen this happen before:

A similar thing happened to Elvis, of course, and to Brando. Jim Morrison, too. Two other dudes who were sexualized the way that we, as a society, sexualize women. Or, if they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp,  if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property. Which is fascinating, in a way. Because so much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. 

Another long-time dedicated conservative journalist quits the movement in disgust:

Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue – like believing that an incredibly mild strain of flu could kill eight times as many Americans as normal seasonal flu. (It killed about a third as many.)

I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.

But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.

Read the whole thing. When I edited TNR, I ran one of Fumento's more controversial pieces, "The Myth Of Heterosexual AIDS" a thesis first aired in Commentary). At the time, his data-gathering and empirical approach to reporting was a helpful counter-weight to government propaganda that everyone was equally at risk. It took balls to write that. But it was true. As true as Michael's devastating indictment of the talk-show/Fox/Malkin far right that now controls the GOP. And he's not afraid to name names:

A single author, Ann Coulter, has published best-selling books accusing liberals, in the titles, of being demonic, godless and treasonous. Michelle Malkin, ranked by the Internet search company PeekYou as having the most traffic of any political blogger, routinely dismisses them as “moonbats, morons and idiots.” Limbaugh infamously dispatched a young woman who expressed her opinion that the government should provide free birth control as a “slut” and a “prostitute.” As a conservative, I disagree with the political opinions of liberals. But to me, a verbal assault indicates insecurity and weakness on the part of the assaulter, as in “Is that the best they can do?” This playground bullying – the name-calling, the screaming, the horrible accusations – all are intended to stifle debate, the very lifeblood of a democracy.

Makes sense to me:

In our NBC-Marist poll of Florida, Romney leads with landline respondents, 48%-45%. But Obama leads among cell phone respondents, 57%-34%. And in Virginia, Romney’s up one among landline folks, 47%-46%, while Obama is up 54%-36% with cell users. (By the way, 28% of our interviews in OH and FL were conducted on cell phone; 27% in VA.)

That's the GOP's generation gap in a nutshell.

New research from MIT could upend the packaging industry – and make pouring ketchup more pleasant for everyone:  

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the "secret" trick: smacking the "57" logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem. 

The result? LiquiGlide, a "super slippery" coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging–though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. "It’s funny: Everyone is always like, 'Why bottles? What’s the big deal?' But then you tell them the market for bottles–just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market," Smith says. "And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year."