Year: 2013

Stephen Marche investigates:

This month, The Carrie Diaries relaunches the Sex and the City franchise while Girls starts up its second season. The contrast is stark: In the old narcissism, we have dumb, beautiful moneyed people trying to become more beautiful and more moneyed. In the new narcissism, we have smart, unattractive poor people trying to confront their pervasive, intense self-obsession. All of the best shows on television, the most urgent, most relevant pop culture of the moment — Louie, Community, the upcoming season of Arrested Development — reflect us as we are: narcissists in search of a cure from ourselves.

[Girls] really is legitimately the marker of a generational turn.

There were women like the women on Girls fifteen years ago. I remember them. They had graduated from the Ivy Leagues, they didn't have good jobs right away, and they were so obsessed with the drama of their own potential that they forgot to do anything. They were writers who talked about what it meant for them to be writers rather than paragraph structure. The brilliance of Lena Dunham — or one of them anyway — is that she's aware of this self-induced crisis. In one of the final scenes of last season's Girls, her boyfriend screams at her, "You love yourself so much," and then gets hit by a truck because he's not paying attention to the world around him. Exactly. She has been self-aware enough to pass through narcissism, at least partially.

Alec MacGillis wishes the press treated Republican debt ceiling recklessness more seriously:

[A] threat to plunge the nation’s into default and with it imperil the nation and world’s economy, seen only a year and a half ago as the political equivalent of a nuclear option, is now viewed as “better political ground.” What to make of this? 

The shift in mindset is surely in part a function of basic human nature: our remarkable ability — for good or ill — to adapt ourselves to new realities. More than that, though, it is a function of that far more Beltway-unique tendency, to report and comment on politics and governance as pure gamesmanship in such a way that conveys savvy but not judgment. And if it’s all a sport, who’s to object if one side has radically shifted the goalposts? Good for them, if they can get away with it. And after all, the higher the stakes in the clash, the better the story.

Bouie adds:

There’s something very wrong with Washington journalism when a threat to imperil the global economy is treated like a round of capture-the-flag.

This is what happens when the “conservative party” is in fact the revolutionary one – eschewing tradition, settled procedure, and institutional protection in favor of partisan ideological vandalism.

Tasha Robinson is struck by how Michael Apted's revolutionary documentary series, tracking British children from age 7 to 56, has evolved. As the program has advanced, publicity features more prominently:

Several of them express regret over artistic or political careers that never coalesced, particularly Neil Hughes, a periodically homeless, perpetually desperate-seeming district-council representative who complains that he just wants to be a writer, but that even the documentary series hasn’t sparked interest in his work. (This may come as bad news to interviewee Peter Davies, who returns to the series after skipping the last three films, and openly states that he’s doing it to draw attention to his latest band.) 

Her takeaway:

Part of Apted’s focus on the everyday seems to be an attempt to get at relatable, universal parallels—the similar concerns and the core values of life. … But the piercing scrutiny probably has its own chilling effect, particularly as the rise of reality television has taught a generation the importance of self-mythologizing by staying calm, cautious, and self-aware in front of cameras. And it’s periodically worth wondering whether some of 56 Up’s expressions of contentment and lack of regret are just the subjects playing to the cameras, knowing their life choices will be scrutinized and analyzed, not just in the moment, but by generations of filmgoers to come.

The NYT interview with director Apted is definitely worth a read. Bilge Ebiri's take:

The film misses out on intimacy, which could do more to reveal these people as individuals, for the sake of charting a broader trajectory. This is more social anthropology than psychology. 56 Up isn’t concerned so much with opening up individual lives as it is with showing us how the journey of an ordinary life — or over a dozen ordinary lives — can offer insights into our own, and into society.

And that was far more emphatically the case when the project was started: it was designed as an exploration into the British class system. My view, having watched almost every one, is that the individual stories eventually trumped the sociological ambition of the series. Maybe that has now come full circle, like so many of the lives in the film itself.

Previous Dish on the series here.

The Dish fiercely opposed the appointment of John Brennan to be CIA director in 2008 because of previous dubious statements about the Bush-Cheney torture program. Well, four years later, he's up for it again. I'm not as inclined to oppose him this time around, in part because torture has ended, and in part because he is increasingly one of the good guys on the drone program. From Dan Klaidman's Newsweek cover:

Brennan, a tough-minded spook who spent 25 years at the CIA, is unapologetic about the secret drone program. Indeed, he has been in many ways its most energetic public defender (if obliquely, since it remains covert). ?But behind the scenes he has also been an advocate for more transparency, placing counterterrorism operations on a firmer legal footing, and imposing reasonable restraints on the CIA’s operators…

Brennan’s “playbook” is more than simply an effort to enshrine the rules of the road for targeted killing. He is seeking to fundamentally reform the process by which targeted-killing decisions are made. One key proposal, according to three administration officials who have been briefed on the matter, is to harmonize the CIA’s and the military’s decision-making process for lethal strikes. This would not be just a bureaucratic rearranging of the deck chairs…

A common decision-making process with more uniform standards would almost certainly force the CIA to behave more like the military—that is, to operate with far less freedom. To take just one example: the CIA engages in a controversial practice known as “signature strikes,” targeting groups of military-age males whose identities are not known but who bear certain characteristics—or signatures—associated with terrorism. Under new protocols, the strikes, sometimes referred to as “crowd killing,” may still be permitted but would likely be more heavily regulated.

People change. If Brennan has Obama's trust in restricting and managing drone strikes with much less lee-way for the CIA, he's performing a vital service in morally re-callibrating the war against the remnants of al Qaeda.

(Photo: John O. Brennan, White House counterterrorism advisor, speaks during a memorial service for the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing at Arlington National Cemetery December 21, 2011 in Arlington, Virginia. By Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.)

A harbinger of an evolving and less zero-sum media landscape?

In need of cash and with extra space on its hands, the liberal magazine The American Prospect decided to sublet part of its Washington offices. The American Conservative, tired of working from Arlington, Va., was looking for a new location. When the publishers Jay Harris of The Prospect and Wick Allison of The Conservative were getting lunch in August, they put two and two together. A six-month lease was soon signed. The self-described bastion of “traditional conservatism” moved in with the self-described “liberal, progressive, lefty” on Dec. 27.

“We have a water fountain labeled conservatives only,” joked Mr. Harris, who cleared the idea with his staff. “We turned to the staff and said, ‘Would you be comfortable?’ To a person, the folks who responded said, ‘Our values are pretty different, but we have a lot of respect for what The American Conservative does journalistically.’ ”

Dish alum Maisie Allison, now at AmCon, highlights the benefits of bipartisanship:

“Since we do not directly compete, we can only benefit from sharing ideas, formally and informally,” she said.