John Baldessari with plaque from Cremation Project, 1970. Trying to make art creates a host of problems. One of the best ways of handling these, as John Baldessari seems to have realized in the mid-1960s, is to let the problems be someone else’s. Then art becomes like the news. “I just read it and laugh,” […]
Not long ago I had a very foolish dream. I was sitting alone in a house when the phone began to ring in another room, a room in which my girlfriend, in turn, was asleep. I didn’t get to it before she awoke and answered it, annoyed, and of course it was for me. The woman on the line said something about something that needed to be done right away, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. She seemed to know me and expected me to know her, and it all seemed quite serious, but I simply
On page 102 of The Center Holds, former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s account of the 2012 election (and his second book about the presidency of Barack Obama), we learn that the president was facing a problem as his 2012 “reelect” approached: Liberals didn’t particularly care what happened to him. “Reenergizing the base was tough,” Alter writes. Fortunately, however, Obama got an assist in this task from right-wing governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, whose wars on public-employee unions and their pensions “proved to be powerful motivators for the base.” Clever Obama campaign people noticed
When the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments over the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act this past February, pundits and reporters used an all-but-obligatory set of phrases to describe the legislation. They characterized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a “landmark” and the “crown jewel” of the civil rights era, and noted that it still represents the “high-water mark” for both civil rights and voting rights. Yet in some sense, all the lofty rhetoric has come to obscure the real story of one of the Johnson administration’s signal achievements. The Voting Rights Act is now
There are only two truly revealing sentences in Zev Chafets’s new biography of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News and message minder for a host of Republican presidents. They serve as bookends of sorts. The first, in the preface, informs us that the project at hand will be superannuated: “He intends to write an autobiography someday, and I imagine he is holding something in reserve.” The second appears 249 pages later, in the acknowledgments: “I am indebted to Brian Lewis, Fox News executive vice president for corporate communications, who was always willing to answer just one more question.”
After living in China for more than a decade, what struck Peter Hessler most upon returning to the US was the way Americans talk. The Chinese “aren’t natural storytellers—they are often deeply modest, and they dislike being at the center of attention.” The Chinese conversational style suits Hessler, whose trademark reporting method could be dubbed Extreme Patience: When he finds a new place, he likes to settle in for what most people would consider an unreasonably long time. At one point in Strange Stones, Hessler’s meticulous, deep-dive collection of essays from China and beyond, he refers offhandedly to the “three
“People expect too much of writers,” Albert Camus lamented in the late 1950s. At the time Camus was writing, the Algerian rebellion had grown into a full-scale guerrilla war for independence, and while his initial sympathy for the uprising led the French Right and the French Algerian settlers to denounce him as a traitor, he also came in for frequent polemical attacks from the French Left for not energetically and unequivocally supporting the insurgents. Criticism also came from the Algerian militants themselves. Frantz Fanon, the best-known Algerian writer, derided him as a “sweet sister.” Sartre, formerly his close friend, mocked
There is no such thing as “the Internet.”
Fifty years ago, one of the great truths that no serious person dared challenge was that humanity was just a few ticks away from the detonation of what Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich dubbed “the population bomb,” in his book of the same name. The world, everyone assumed, would be awash in (even more) hungry mouths to feed.
Hope Against Hope takes place in a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, but even more prominent in journalist Sarah Carr’s story is a highly unnatural disaster: American poverty. The daily lives of many New Orleans schoolchildren, before and after Katrina, amount to an ongoing state of emergency, one that can make the stable, orderly enterprise of learning close to impossible. Kids must get up at 5AM so mothers can get to low-wage jobs. Teens get shot, or watch their friends die.
In the gushing, breathless copy that justifies Gavin Newsom’s lead spot in his publisher’s catalogue, we learn that “government cannot keep functioning in a twentieth-century mindset.” We are informed further that Newsom, the present lieutenant governor of California, and formerly the youngest mayor of San Francisco in more than a century, came to his tirelessly sanguine view of digital democracy by overseeing the digital renovation of San Francisco’s city hall. In a flourish as logical as it is grammatical, we learn that “Newsom’s quest to modernize one of America’s most modern cities—and the amazing results he achieves—form the backbone of
Most of us would like to believe that our doctors spend every free moment buried in medical journals, impervious to the long tentacles of drug companies—no matter what their inexhaustible supplies of AstraZeneca pens and Eli Lilly clipboards may suggest to the contrary. But physician and journalist Ben Goldacre takes firm and decisive aim at that comforting myth in Bad Pharma, a sequel of sorts to his 2009 title, Bad Science.
For years it’s been said in circles both polite and impolite, and in ways both delicate and indelicate, that America’s blacks should learn to live more like America’s Jews. Writing in the Jewish Journal in 2006, the black former New York Times reporter Eric Copage said he once asked himself “if there were things Jews do that blacks should adopt to become more prosperous.” “My answer,” he continued, “an emphatic yes.”
One dark night in South Vietnam in mid-1969, I stopped for a beer at the rickety shack that served as an officers’ club for the First Marine Division, based a few miles outside of Da Nang, on the central coast. I had just delivered an intelligence report warning of an enemy rocket attack on the city.
When I was eleven years old, my room was a shrine to the New York City sports stars of the 1980s. The posters on my wall included the Giants’ fearsome linebacker Lawrence Taylor, the Knicks’ quicksilver forward Bernard King, and the Mets’ triumvirate of awesomeness: first baseman Keith Hernandez, outfielder Darryl Strawberry, and their phenomenal nineteen-year-old pitcher Dwight Gooden. I imitated their every move on the field, and fantasized—in an elementary-school-boy fashion—about their lives off the field. What I didn’t know was that all of these athletes had serious love affairs with cocaine. In retrospect, it was like having posters
At the end of the summer of 1892, three young and feverishly idealistic Russian immigrants, whose hopes for living in a free and just society had been crushed by their experiences in the Lower East Side slums of Manhattan, were operating a successful ice-cream parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts. They wanted to save enough money to return to Russia, where they believed revolution was imminent.
Why is there no socialism in the United States? Why, when the industrialization of every other Western nation was accompanied by the evolution of institutions to insure the population ever more generously against economic risk, did the mightiest industrial nation of all go the other way? (Pace the paranoid fantasies of the Tea Party Right.)
Prosecutors, a judge, and a jury put Jeffrey MacDonald behind bars more than three decades ago for the murder of his pregnant wife and two young daughters. But according to Errol Morris, he’s been kept there by the power of narrative. “You can escape from prison, but how do you escape from a convincing story?” asks Morris in his new book, A Wilderness of Error.
The title promises the definitive lowdown. Between these covers, it implies, you will find everything you’ll ever need to know about the dynamics of collaboration, the craft of stage performance and studio recording, the nitty-gritty of the music industry. But you’ll also learn about how music affects us emotionally and what, ultimately, it is for.
Taken out of context, Mohandas Gandhi’s famous remark of 1921, that “India lives in her villages,” lends itself to multiple interpretations. Gandhi might have meant, as indeed he believed, that the country’s bedrock spirit and the traditions to serve it best resided in its rural heartland. He might have referred to pure demographics; at the time, nearly 90 percent of India’s populace of 251 million was rural. He might also have wished to note, by way of political strategy, that an independent India would emerge only if the nationalist movement escaped from the cities and ventured into the villages, kindling
