Category: The Dish

Ouch:

Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.

A diverting analogy from Edward Hirsch:

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling. For as long as I can remember, I have associated that calling, my life’s work, with walking. I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it, setting out and taking off. You cross a threshold and you’re on your way. Time is suspended. Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. Poetry is written from the body as well as the mind, and the rhythm and pace of a walk can get you going and keep you grounded. It’s a kind of light meditation. Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry — a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language — and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Everyone loves The Onion:

No one has panned the Onion News Network. Of course not. America has inexhaustible reserves of good will for the homespun Onion, which started as a print weekly in Wisconsin in 1988, as it does for no other national comedy institution except maybe Mark Twain. “The Simpsons” is past its prime. “The Daily Show” is admired but partisan. And each incarnation of “Saturday Night Live” bugs its audience in a new way. The Onion, though, is like overwork or pizza. It’s your patriotic duty to not not like it.

A map:

Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines.

Michelle Cottle has some very juicy details from within the Clinton camp. Man, Mark Penn sounds like a douche.

"If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself," – Thomas A. Frank, Wall Street Journal.

A really fascinating dialogue among two brutally honest writers. Loury basically admits he’s for Clinton out of boomer loyalty and identity. I wonder if this election, whatever else it is about, will ultimately be about a generational shift.

Washington, DC, 2.42 pm.

A new magazine:

Meatpaper isn’t really about meat, it’s about “the idea of meat,” the editors explained in the first issue last fall. “Half the people who pick up Meatpaper assume it’s some kind of vegan hate letter addressed to their salami sandwich. The other half wonder if we’re subsidized by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. That’s how we know we’re on to something.”

Do they all need to come out to dispel stereotypes?