No More Nieman Conference

suspended

You could see this coming: I write to tell you of the Nieman Foundation's decision to suspend the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism and the Nieman Seminar for Narrative Editors during the 2009-2010 academic year.

This will disappoint those who have participated in the conferences in the past and who anticipated attending another narrative gathering in the spring of 2010. This difficult step reflects the foundation's need to make a major reduction in spending for the next fiscal year, beginning in July.

Stay tuned, though, for the Southern Chautauqua, on a farm outside Atlanta, brought to you by Gangrey and Charmin Ultra. Details pending.

Posted by ben on 06/01/09 at 13:47 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Dear Daddy

a tribute

Lane DeGregory: NEW PORT RICHEY -- She painted her toenails black for the funeral. Her mom said she could wear make-up, just a little, so her big sister helped her line her blue eyes.

Jillian Landes, 11, is finishing sixth grade at Hudson Middle School. On this day she "wanted to look good, you know, grown up." For her dad.

In the pocket of her shorts she had a note for him. She took it out now, to show her sister. She had torn a page from a spiral notebook, folded it into a small square. Large, loopy letters in blue ballpoint crawled across the page.

"I wrote it the night after he died," she said. "I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. They wouldn't let kids into that part of the prison."

Her sister, Jenna Knight, 22, curled onto the couch next to Jillian. Jenna has the same mom as Jillian but a different dad. She smoothed her sister's letter in her lap.

"I want to read it at the church tonight," Jillian said softly.

"I want him to hear it. But I'm sorta, kinda ... not really worried," she sniffled. "I just don't want to start crying and mess up all the words. Or my make-up."

Posted by ben on 06/01/09 at 14:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Texas Water Safari

human muscle

Michael Brick: SEADRIFT, Tex. — The rowboat was called the Delta Dawn. It measured 24 feet long by 28 inches wide by 11 ½ inches deep. The bow was sealed with sawdust and epoxy, and the sides were assembled from two-by-fours of clear spruce. Butch Hodges set the beams in place one by one, alternating sides the way a guitarist changes strings. But first he built a table, a platform straight and true.

“Your boat’s going to be as good as your table is,” Hodges said.

His boat was good enough to win the 1976 Texas Water Safari, billed as the world’s toughest river race. A commemorative photograph shows him shirtless and triumphant, a wild man with a can of Budweiser and a slab of barbecue, the last to paddle to victory in anything so primitive as a homemade wooden rowboat.

Posted by ben on 06/01/09 at 14:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Art Of The Walk-Up Song

behind the music

Dugan Arnett: Nick Faunce’s introduction to matters involving the walk-up song — that is, the song played throughout a stadium as a particular player walks to the plate — came four years ago, during his red-shirt freshman season with the Kansas University baseball team.

Figuring he wouldn’t see much game action in his first year on the team’s active roster, Faunce, now a senior, didn’t bother to select an entrance song, leaving the team’s support staff to use a track it already had on file. As a result, each time he emerged from the dugout that season — which turned out to be several times — he did so to Lil’ John’s “Yeah!” a boisterous and overtly sensual rap song that, as one teammate was happy to point out, “doesn’t really fit an outfielder from Oregon.”

Says Faunce, who has since changed songs but still endures regular chiding from teammates for his rookie blunder, “It was entirely embarrassing every time I came to the plate that year.”

Posted by ben on 06/01/09 at 14:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Endangered

la mag cans writers

Here: Another endangered species in print journalism took a hit this week as Los Angeles magazine fired the writers Steve Oney, Jesse Katz and David Gardetta.

Here’s the job description, now gone at yet another periodical: “longform narrative magazine writer, with staff jobs—and benefits.” It’s a good gig. You come up with a big idea for a story, report it out for a couple of months, write 10,000 words or so. Then you win valuable prizes and appear in anthology books. You feel like you are carrying on the tradition of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Lillian Ross and Hunter S. Thompson. You are part of a dwindling circle of eminences that includes William Langewiesche of the Atlantic Monthly (now with Vanity Fair) and Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated. The blogosphere, meanwhile, thinks you’re a long-winded bore.

How twee it all sounds. “It’s like being a blacksmith,” says Oney, who is closing a 13,500-word opus for the July issue, an oral history of the Manson family marking the 40th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Then he looks for work.

Posted by ben on 06/01/09 at 16:12 | Comments (13) | Trackbacks (0)

Shrinkage

OUR DECLINING MEASUREMENTS

Check out the Wall Street Journal's interactive graphic on how far newspapers have fallen.

Is the St. Petersburg Times the only major paper that has managed to avoid layoffs and pay cuts?

Posted by Tom Lake on 06/02/09 at 03:45 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Secrets He Kept

'he's a good salesman'

Tim Botos: JACKSON TWP. — If Timothy Welland Hyde is good at one thing, it’s selling. With slick, tightly cropped black hair and round dark eyes, a voice for radio and a warm smile, he welcomed clients to his financial advising business in Jackson Township. For a variety of fees and commissions, he and employees arranged client investments in stocks and securities. By all appearances, Hyde Financial was a success. It was located in Suite 302 on the third floor of one of the area’s premier office buildings, known as the Belden Village glass tower.

At work, Hyde is regarded as a financial genius and brilliant mathematician. He not only handled his own clients, but he also served as a guru to a handful of his other brokers, who together managed at least $63 million in client assets.

“He made money for me,” said 66-year-old Joan Kinsley of Lake Township, a client and retiree from R.C.A. Rubber Co. “He was always bragging about having Internet access to trading information that only he and the Timken Co. had.”

A married father of two, Hyde and his family lived in a half-million dollar home in Jackson’s Carrington Estates. He drives a 2008 black Cadillac Escalade and wears Rolex watches, fancy suits and shoes on his 6-foot, 195-pound frame. Image, he told people, matters. Look successful and clients will invest with you, he’d say.

His safe and seemingly well-to-do world, though, was merely a mask. In the past four months, pieces of his disguise slowly eroded, exposing bits of his true identity.

There’s much more to Hyde.

Posted by ben on 06/02/09 at 14:33 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

The End Of The Affair

wild horses

P.J. O'Rourke (thanks, Nigel): The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Posted by ben on 06/04/09 at 13:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Last Little School

what once was

Michael Kruse: DUETTE

Out here toward the center of the state, in the far northeast corner of Manatee County, there sits a school.

Duette Elementary is a small, white wood building with a front porch and tall windows with red trim. It's Florida's last one-teacher schoolhouse.

Thursday was the last day of school.

Maybe forever.

Duette is tiny and isolated, fence-post, wide-sky rural. The volunteer fire district, 136 square miles, has fewer than 1,000 people. There's no post office. There's the Duette Country Store, there's the Dry Prairie Baptist Church, and there's the school.

It's been here for nearly 80 years, set on 10 acres surrounded by citrus groves, strawberry fields and phosphate mines.

The school isn't just the heart of the community.

It pretty much is the community.

Posted by ben on 06/08/09 at 13:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Fragile Sense Of Hope

'this is south central'

Scott Gold: The boys had made no effort to hide the shotgun, so it was found, loaded, right where they'd left it, on the top bunk in their bedroom, next to a pile of clothes and two school books, "Decimals" and "The Language of Literature."

The LAPD had pulled up to the little house near midnight, with the boys in the back of two squad cars. There had been gunfire in the area, near Vernon Avenue, and the brothers had been picked up during a street sweep. They were known to the police; the older one had been in the Barrio Mojados gang for four years and walked with a slight limp after being shot by rivals. He was now 17.

Their mother let the police inside. There was soup on, still warm, and the house smelled like onions. The lights were dim, bathing the place in the color of a week-old bruise. Sgt. Rick Arteaga cornered the mother, Maria Garcia. "This is a dangerous weapon, in a room where four children sleep," he told her. "You are the parent here!"

Garcia, 35, tried to explain: The boys' lives were at risk, she told him. The gun was for defense. There were no jobs, not here; they had no money to move away from their troubles. Finally, defeated, she whispered: "This is South-Central."

Posted by ben on 06/08/09 at 14:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Doctor Vasectomy

15 minutes

Quick story: I'm holding the baby and watching the kids run around at the play place at Tampa's International Plaza when the guy sitting next to me asks: "Which ones are yours?"
"Those two," I say. "And this one. But that's it."
"That's it?" he asks.
"Yep. Impossible now."
He thinks for a second.
"Dr. Stein?" he asks.
"Yep," I say. "In and out in 15 minutes."
"Me, too," he says. Then he gives me a fist bump.

Here's Leonora LaPeter Anton: TAMPA

The architect is flat on his back, a paper sheet draped over his lap. His wife wanted him to get a vasectomy after child No. 3. He hesitated. Four months ago, he welcomed child No. 4.

Dr. Doug Stein hovers over him, a bottle of Betadine in his hand.

"Exposing your privates to some stranger is not the greatest thing, I know," he says as he works to sterilize Chuck Allen, 42, at his office in North Tampa.

"Yeah, that was probably part of it," Allen mumbles. A faint burning smell fills the room.

It's done.

Guys like Allen come to Stein at the rate of 50 a week, 200 a month, 2,500 a year.

They're trusting it all to a man they probably first saw larger than life while driving 70 mph down some highway, a guy who does vasectomies by the busload, a guy whose services are marketed on coasters in bars, in pamphlets in child support offices and on billboards all over Florida.

Posted by ben on 06/08/09 at 16:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Scariest Place In America

towel snaps

Ben: It is a place where lessons are learned and rank is established, where armpit hair is more valuable than gold. There is urination and defecation and embarrassing nudity on this unsupervised island. There are fistfights and ambushes and God help you if your mother writes your name on your underpants. Or if your name rhymes with a sex organ.

Posted by Kruse on 06/08/09 at 17:24 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Sold Out

Pontiac: The Official Car of the 2009 Economic Crisis

Dan Barry: HOUSTON, Pa.

The Arnold Pontiac dealership is not one of those glass-encased bazaars winking from the main drag, with a showroom the size of a parking lot and a name that sounds like a law firm with too many partners: “Acme Chevrolet Buick Jeep Hyundai Volkswagen Kia Saab. How may I direct your call?”

No, Arnold Pontiac pretty much says it all.

The dealership sits exactly where the Arnold family began a car business back in 1916: on the corner of North Main and East Pike in the pit-stop Western Pennsylvania town of Houston, right next to the First Presbyterian Church, where Arnolds are baptized. Small showroom downstairs, service and parts upstairs, free Pontiac calendars everywhere.

Posted by ben on 06/09/09 at 13:56 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Jobs, Now, Please

Intersecting lives in a small town

Tom Lake: Ghosts came to work in the carpet mills. They tried to be silent and invisible. The government ignored them, as it had the ghosts who brought in the onion crop and built the Olympic village, because there were too many jobs and not enough workers. The ghosts were willing. They were hungry. They filled apartments along Fifth Avenue and Morris Street and paid the rent on time and fixed their own broken showers because they were too timid to call the landlord, and they obeyed traffic laws while driving to work in their busted-up Geo Metros because they were deathly afraid of police. They worked quickly, without complaint, their heartbeats lost in the hum of the tufting machines. Their money was ghost money, vanishing dollars, born again in another country, called by another name.

But even the lightest footstep leaves a mark.

Posted by ben on 06/11/09 at 15:19 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

What He's Capable Of

flesh-eating bacteria

Misti Crane and Jeb Phillips: Almost three months after his right calf started hurting, after countless prayers, after nearly 20 surgeries and fear that he wouldn't make it, Blake Haxton sat tall in his wheelchair on Tuesday.

He's thinner than in his senior picture, taken when he was in peak physical form, when many considered him the best high-school rower in the state. A sheet was wrapped around his lap on Tuesday and gauze around his right arm. His Upper Arlington Crew shirt hung off him.

What, he was asked, was the most difficult thing he had to overcome during all of this?

"Learning to eat hospital food," he said.

Posted by ben on 06/12/09 at 13:50 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Send The Reporters Home

yesss

From the New Yorker's Book Bench: Yesterday, Ha’aretz — Israel’s oldest newspaper — sent home all of its regular reporters and contributors, and replaced them with famous literary scribes. It might sound like a gimmick to woo readers (and it is, in part), but the results yielded unexpected delights.

Posted by ben on 06/12/09 at 19:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A Third Category

THE PAINTING

As Roy Peter Clark says, most nonfiction writing falls into one of two categories: the story and the report. Many articles are hybrids. They use elements of both. They have narrative lines and long expository sections. Anyway, a while ago I read something that I wouldn't put in either category. Matter of fact, I think it needs its own category: the painting.

The piece, by Justin Heckert, is called Our Man Skip:

Again, his dogs are at the door. Pawing, whimpering, scratching at its wooden frame with front legs spinning in desperation, three of them—returning just now to be let in, returning from wherever they have been inside the fence in the reaches of his back yard and demanding to be let in, fur specked with dust and dirt like the gold in a sifter’s pan: Cleo, a mixed breed, Sam, the retriever, and Newman, also a mix, who had been blind in both eyes, and who his wife had fallen in love with, restoring his sight—$1,000 an eye. And the dogs are panting, with tongues that drag from their mouths like strips of strawberry gum, because, outside, well, it’s been a sauna, wet-hot and muggy. From the air-conditioned inside he has watched them for the last ten minutes or so come into view near the birdfeeder at the edge of the rock pond to bound clumsily up to the door while crashing into one another, grunting and barking, chasing through and over the perfectly trimmed grass, a scene he has watched intently through a large rectangular window that consumes nearly an entire wall of his kitchen (a window that shimmers as if it has been recently and thoroughly cleaned) and his neck is bent while looking out, and his arms rest together on the table beneath the pictures his wife has painted, left hand rubbing his right forearm, eyes lost behind glasses, just like his father, the beloved Harry, the legendary baseball announcer; and at this moment out of the humid afternoon and in the cool hum of his kitchen Skip Caray looks like his father, down to the pinch of nose and the scrub of red cheeks and pillowed bottom lip and pouch chin and at times, that smirk sketched so perfectly near the bottom of both their faces—

Posted by Tom Lake on 06/13/09 at 20:44 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Redneck Yacht Club

four fingers

John Pendygraft Kruse: The people in the trucks were mechanics, roofers, wrecker drivers, current and former military men. Inside, they parked RVs, pitched tents, hammered in horseshoe pits and pulled the tabs on the tops of beers. They said they were here for the competition, the camaraderie, the feeling of freedom, the smiles on the faces of kids, the . . .

Two ATVs zipped by with girls in tank tops and short shorts, riding on the backs with their legs spread, their thighs jiggling and their breasts bouncing with the bumps of the land.

The 21-year-old son of a 40-year-old divorced dad shook his head and took a sip of his Natural Ice.

"Can't get enough of that," he said.

Posted by ben on 06/15/09 at 13:56 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

The Happy Hotel

silliness, decadence, curves, the future

Hank Stuever: Morris Lapidus -- the late, great Googie master of South Beach-style architecture -- was hired to design the Skyline Inn motor hotel in 1961, which is why it looks so spaceshippy, like it crash-landed six blocks south of the U.S. Capitol and failed utterly in its mission of alien invasion. By the 1970s, the hotel was thought of as ugly and so was the neighborhood.

This exact kind of ugly is perfect now.

But not retro!

The present owners? The somewhat famous Rubell family? They'll tell you how they hate putting quotation marks -- a knowing (") with a (") -- around what they're doing to the Capitol Skyline Hotel. They hate putting quotation marks around fun. That's the worst, when people act too cool, when there's a VIP list, when cocktails at a hotel pool get jacked up to $14 apiece and the DJ thinks he's the oonce-oonce-oonce messiah. They know there's a fine line here -- they're from Miami -- when the decor and atmosphere go too far toward the stylized. That's what the Rubells didn't want to happen here.

Posted by ben on 06/16/09 at 14:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

'The Truth Doesn't Matter'

self defense

Leonora LaPeter Anton: The boy changed the name of his essay three times. It started out as The Clown That Made Nobody Laugh.

Then The Clown Man.

Now, as Anthony Savage stood nervously reading his story to his class, he called it The Truth Don't Always Set You Free.

One kid had read an essay about basketball. Another had told the class about his birthday party. Anthony's story was about something that he'd thought about almost every day for three years.

Chuck swung the bat and hit my brother . . .

Anthony kept his eyes on the paper.

My brother grabbed his pocketknife and stabbed him . . .

He couldn't look up.

After a while they came and told us Chuck had died . . .

Posted by ben on 06/16/09 at 14:15 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Recession Meets Wrestling

underdogs

Danielle Dreilinger: First, the ref disarmed wrestler "Psycho" of his hula hoop.

The other Chaotic Wrestling fighters wore Lycra shorts and knee pads. Psycho, a reported 192 pounds and 5 feet 10 - plus a few inches of hot-pink hair - wore a straitjacket under a yellow singlet stamped with a happy face. The ref patted him down and found gadget after gadget, plus a slice of pizza. Psycho ate it.

He wasn't set up for victory against 340-pound Brian Milonas. But when the big guy socked his head into a post, Psycho just laughed. Milonas won. The crowd booed. A fan shook her head, saying, "This is not a fair match."

It was a Saturday night in Lawrence at the Plains Community Center. Chaotic Wrestling Inc., a promoter that operates out of North Andover, had set up its ring in a basketball court with water-damage-streaked walls. About 90 people, mostly kids and families, drank cans of Market Basket soda and cheered for Psycho.

With that kind of passion and that little money, low-level professional wrestling has held up relatively well in the recession.

Posted by ben on 06/18/09 at 13:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Who's Got Next?

you now have power

Wright Thompson: WASHINGTON -- Baron Hill is in training, working on his jumper, pumping iron, doing rep after tedious rep on the weight machines to strengthen his bum knee. He swore 15 years ago that he'd never play competitive basketball again, but here he is at his health club, 55 years old, shooting baskets alone. Once, he was an Indiana high school legend, a member of the state's hall of fame, but those pictures are in black and white.

Just your typical bourgeois midlife crisis, right? Not exactly. Consider who Hill is, where he is and why he's doing this. For starters, he's an influential member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a powerful guy, co-chairman of the Blue Dog Democrats. The court he's on isn't at a local Y. He's in Room SB-322 of the Rayburn House Office Building: the famous House gym. There's a little electronic device he keeps on his key chain that lets him in whenever he wants.

The why is a bit more complicated. Outside D.C., it would seem absurd. In D.C., it's just doing business. Getting his basketball game up to speed isn't about him. Well, that's not entirely true. It's somewhat about him, about his own political future. But it's also for the 675,000 citizens of his Indiana district, the people he has been sent here to serve. The reason he's back in training isn't because he wants to be but because the president of the United States likes to ball.

Posted by ben on 06/18/09 at 13:46 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

The Good Soldiers

just noticed

You can now preorder David Finkel's new one.

It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.

Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.

What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Posted by ben on 06/18/09 at 21:01 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Thoughts?

just throwing it out there

Lawrence Weschler: I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The class I teach at NYU is called “The Fiction of Nonfiction,” and it is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get down to business and talk about all the stuff that’s interesting: form, freedom, irony, voice, tone, structure.

Posted by Kruse on 06/19/09 at 18:08 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

The Truth Rundown

Inside scientology

Wow. Wow. Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin: Part ONE of THREE

The leader of the Church of Scientology strode into the room with a boom box and an announcement: Time for a game of musical chairs.

David Miscavige had kept more than 30 members of his church's executive staff cooped up for weeks in a small office building outside Los Angeles, not letting them leave except to grab a shower. They slept on the floor, their food carted in.

Their assignment was to develop strategic plans for the church. But the leader trashed their every idea and berated them as incompetents and enemies, of him and the church.

Prove your devotion, Miscavige told them, by winning at musical chairs. Everyone else — losers, all of you — will be banished to Scientology outposts around the world. If families are split up, too bad.

To the music of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody they played through the night, parading around a conference room in their Navy-style uniforms, grown men and women wrestling over chairs.

Posted by ben on 06/22/09 at 13:16 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Withers

It's time for work

Mike Anton: An hour before dawn in the camp of last resort. Dozens of men and a few women are asleep in the beds of pickup trucks, in the back seats of cars or on flattened cardboard boxes in the dirt behind the Toro Loco market. The air is cool, but the terrible sun is close at hand.

Martin Zavala is wrapped in a blanket, his head resting on a Scooby-Doo pillow, a pack of Marlboros under his neck. Thieves prowl at night and will snatch what is not secured. Drunks and meth-addled tweakers tease the dozing grape pickers, poking them with knives or guns. Zavala, his brother and four friends positioned their vehicles to form a protective perimeter -- modern-day covered wagons on a wild frontier.

Posted by ben on 06/24/09 at 13:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

More Than Case No. 09-01458

a family's story

Ian Shapira: YaVonne and Erwin DuBose stepped outside the D.C. medical examiner's office yesterday to take in the fresh heat. They needed a reprieve. They had just seen a photograph of their 29-year-old daughter, Veronica DuBose, one of nine people killed in this week's Metro train crash, her face yellowed, bruised and swollen.

Asked to identify her body, they pinpointed the mole on her lip and her finely arched eyebrows. Their daughter's life was now boiled down to a bureaucratic moniker -- Case No. 09-01458 -- on a Proof of Death certificate.

"Unbelievable to see that," said Erwin, 56, a procurement specialist at the National Institutes of Health, standing on the morgue's steps. "It didn't even look like her. I asked if she got burned, but they didn't know. I can't remember. Was there a fire on the train?"

Posted by ben on 06/25/09 at 13:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Salud!

Tommy Tomlinson's Back

Show him some love.

Posted by ben on 06/25/09 at 14:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Freedom To Trivialize

“Time is the thing we have the least of”

William McKeen on the impact of information overload on a new generation:

Novelist and social critic Tom Wolfe is among those who arch eyebrows over the time and labor-saving devices granted us by technology. Such things as iPhones and Twitter “waste more time than anything else in American life,” he says. “The computer and the Internet are the contemporary versions of knitting and badminton in the backyard, except that they have nothing to show for it afterward, the way knitting does, and lead to atrocious sedentary posture and sloth, unlike badminton.”

Wolfe’s social criticism has marked his journalism and his fiction, most notably in his satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. As the man responsible for tagging those who achieved adulthood in the 1970s as “the Me Generation,” Wolfe’s antennae are alert to any new examples of silliness and narcissism. Tweeting one’s most mundane activities is high goofiness indeed.

(Pramod) Khargonekar (outgoing dean of the University of Florida College of Engineering) agrees with Wolfe. What’s most important, he says, is how we use technology. It’s easy to fall in love with each new device and development. “There is euphoria with any new technology,” he says. “Of course, there are excesses that happen, but in time these things will take their place in the scheme of things.”

But critics such as Wolfe worry “these things” that are supposed to make life better could make things worse. He uses Thomas Jefferson as an example. He had at least eight careers in addition to his job of creating American democracy. “Today,” Wolfe laments, “two-thirds of his life would be consumed answering inane e-mails.” If Jefferson had a Twitter account, we might all still be foreigners.

Posted by ben on 06/25/09 at 21:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Jacko Reader

the goods

On his life and death:

Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo: Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy. He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywood exile of Charlie Chaplin. He married the daughter of Elvis Presley.

Jackson met his own untimely death Thursday at age 50, and more than any of those past icons, he left a complicated legacy. As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped.


Hank Stuever and Matt Schudel: ... That particular weirdness eventually led Mr. Jackson back to court in the spring of 2005, after the boy accused the pop star of molesting him. Mr. Jackson's fragility was never more pronounced than in that Santa Maria courthouse. Here at last was the daily, up-close look at a withered man in a mirror, under the courtroom's fluorescent lights. He was always polite, and always sad. Mr. Jackson was acquitted and spent the rest of his days on the move, on jets and in hotels, dodging bankruptcy proceedings, as if he were on the run from not only what he was, but what the world made him.


Sean Daly: ... Over the next decade, there was a sense among the general populace that it wasn't cool to praise Jackson — at least not out loud. But I was at more than a few clubs where, when the clock struck midnight, that hip-thrusty beat of Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' would kick in, and people would smile and move and sing in the dark, willing to forgive — or at least forget — because it was irresistible, life-affirming even.

This brings us back to his legacy and its endurance. Jackson recently embarked on a comeback, or at least planned one. He sold out 50 shows in London's giant O2 arena, and he sold that sucker out fast. His fans, a lot of fans, still cared — and this time, they cared out loud.


John McWhorter: The question, which he never even ventured an answer to, was why. Who was this personnage supposed to be? White? Gay? Perhaps we were to allow that he was just being "him." But leaving unanswered just who that "him" was supposed to be was, most charitably interpreted, too far ahead of our times. It left him a faintly gruesome cipher.


Joe Gross: There will never, ever be anyone like Michael Jackson again.

Let's start with the numbers, which are almost beyond comprehension.

Thirty-seven Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Twenty-nine U.S. Top 10 singles, 13 of them No. 1's, nine of them platinum sellers, 16 gold.

Thirteen Grammy Awards and 750 million albums sold worldwide.

Seven-hundred-and-fifty-million.

Owning a Michael Jackson record is a bit like having a phone or a stove.


From the archives:

Gerri Hirshey, 1983: Run this down next to the stats, the successes, and it doesn't add up. He has been the featured player with the Jackson Five since grade school. In 1980, he stepped out of the Jacksons to record his own LP, Off the Wall, and it became the best-selling album of the year. Thriller, his new album, is Number Five on the charts. And the list of performers now working with him ? or wanting to ? includes Paul McCartney, Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Queen and Jane Fonda. On record, onstage, on TV and screen, Michael Jackson has no trouble stepping out. Nothing scares him, he says. But this....

"Do you like doing this?" Michael asks. There is a note of incredulity in his voice, as though he were asking the question of a coroner. He is slumped in a dining-room chair, looking down into the lower level of the living room. It is filled with statuary. There are some graceful, Greco-Roman type bronzes, as well as a few pieces from the suburban birdbath school. The figures are frozen around the sofa like some ghostly tea party.


Michael Goldberg: The seven dwarfs are singing. Their voices are floating out of speakers hidden among the trees and lush flora surrounding Michael Jackson's mansion, in Neverland Valley — his 2700-acre, $22 million oasis in the Santa Ynez Valley, an hour north of Santa Barbara, California. "Michael's very own Xanadu," as his friend director John Landis puts it.

At Neverland Jackson has created a secluded and secure environment far from businessmen, attorneys, managers, music-television-channel VIPs and even members of his immediate family. Here he can stand in front of his house and the only sounds to hear are the birds in the oak and sycamore trees and, of course, the Seven Dwarfs. And if he chooses to gaze past the expansive lake that stretches out in front of his three-story Tudoresque country home, past the lush green lawns and neatly manicured flower beds, the bronze statues of young boys beating tambourines or playing toy accordions, he sees simply a peaceful hillside dotted with oaks.


Stuever, 2002: Stray thoughts, unfinished paragraphs and meandering ruminations on the frightening, fascinating and ultimately unsatisfying subject of Michael Jackson, 20 years after his album "Thriller" first began to climb up the pop charts.

1. Michael Jackson: He makes the Weekly World News seem true, every page of it.

2. Michael Jackson: The tawdriness involved with just looking at pictures of him, the leering and uncomfy feelings, the what now? of Michael Jackson. People will look anyhow. He is powder and synthetic hair and paint and so much frailty. Where the nose used to be, there is now an exposed piece of plastic that looks like part of a tiny, tiny ice cube tray, revealing the architecture of his proboscidean desire -- the upturned nose of the pretty starlet. It has eroded away. If supercelebrity facilitates the creation of a family of those who adulate and those who are adulated (the other uneasy family Michael Jackson belongs to, aside from the one to which he was physically born), then he is like a relative we cannot help. We are LaToya to him. We seethe like Jermaine. We surpass him like Janet. He rejects us even as he needs us. There is the urge to intervene, to understand him as a celebrity, to contemplate his very success and failure and existence. But to do any of that, you have to first see him, on some level, as a human being. This is where it all goes wrong.

3. Michael Jackson: Dangling his shrouded baby from a hotel balcony! Stop that!



Who else? Post 'em.

Posted by ben on 06/26/09 at 14:29 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

This Is Their Story

Train 112, Car 1079

Eli Saslow (thanks, Mara): He heard the familiar whine of a Metro train approaching the platform, and Tom Baker decided to run for it. The next train was scheduled to arrive at Takoma Station in two minutes, another in six minutes and yet another in 10. But it was the first Monday of summer, and Baker had left work early with a weightlifting routine to complete and an overgrown garden to tend. A doctor at Walter Reed with an emergency pager affixed to his waist, Baker had learned to schedule and protect every minute of his free time. This was his train.

Posted by ben on 06/29/09 at 13:38 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

At The Mercy Of Her Mind

400

Shari Roan (thanks, Raja): It's been a rough week. A few days ago, at UCLA's Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, 6-year-old Jani toppled a food cart and was confined to her room. She slammed her head against the floor, opening a bloody cut that sent her into hysterics. Later, she kicked the hospital therapy dog.

Jani normally likes animals. But most of her animal friends -- cats, rats, dogs and birds -- are phantoms that only she can see. January Schofield has schizophrenia. Potent psychiatric drugs -- in doses that would stagger most adults -- seem to skip off her. She is among the rarest of the rare: a child seemingly born mentally ill.

Posted by ben on 06/29/09 at 13:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Spirals

a fired reporter tries to come around

Steve Persall: She wanted to be a dancer or an actor and was lovely enough to be either. Instead, she became a newspaper reporter and a damn fine one.

But she looked nothing like the woman I once knew as she sat next to me the other evening at the Hub, the inveterate bar in downtown Tampa; puffier, sadder, disheveled, speaking in jumbled threads of thought that only another drug addict or a patiently sympathetic ear can understand. She fumbled in her purse for lord knows what, knocking over the rum and Coke.

Posted by ben on 06/30/09 at 14:28 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)