March 11, 6:11 PM | Current issue: April 2010 · Archive |
Links | Links |
Scott Horton | Is Torture a Leading U.S. Export? |
Ken Silverstein | Senator Ensign’s Spirit of Bipartisanship |
Christopher R Beha | Weekly Review |
Basically, Too Big to Fail is the 24 of financial-crisis books. The world is about to blow up, and everybody is Jack Bauer. Interestingly, the only figure to emerge with at least a shred of personality is Dick Fuld. Sorkin has assembled so much material on the Lehman lifer that the reader is able to witness the unraveling of his personality as months of stress and sleepless nights take their toll. After a while, the only person who doesn’t know he’s finished as CEO of Lehman is Fuld himself. –“The Price of Admission: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s debut and the limits of access journalism,” Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review
TBTF companion piece, Too Legit to Quit; a victim of the financial crisis survives on frequent flier miles and hotel points; plus, he still finds time to tweet: @HomelessThomOC
“We call it the Wow signal,” Paul Davies says. “It was a radio telescope in Ohio, back in the days when they didn’t have the electronic gadgetry to go ‘ping’ if there was something weird. So they looked at a computer print-out some weeks afterwards, and it showed a signal that went on for 72 seconds. Nobody was listening at the time. The researcher wrote ‘Wow’ in the margin. And many times radio telescopes have been turned on that star, but nothing odd has ever happened again.” –“First contact: The man who’ll welcome aliens,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian
When the extraterrestrials arrive, what will they find? Children starving while their parents raise virtual kids; gamblers betting on songbird deathmatches; motorists driving while distracted by their bikini lines;
Although Reality Hunger’s structure was initially interesting, I think it is ultimately a failure and one that illuminates a problem in his argument. Much of the book is spent discussing the relevance of collage art and remixing in modern music. I am a great fan of both and agree that appropriating, remixing, and reinventing are vital tools for modern artists. But the entire point of remixing is to blend the disparate elements together so that they both recall and distort their previous meaning. This effect is not realized by simply placing different things next to each other. Pasting Picasso’s famous “Art is theft” line next to several similar quotations does not distort or reinvent his words. A collage artist does not crop a few different images and paste them on separate sheets of paper. A mash-up artist like Girl Talk, who Shields discusses, does not present you with a few seconds of horns followed by a few seconds of a cappella rapping finished off with a guitar solo. The collage artist and DJ blend their various pieces together into something strangely familiar yet startlingly new. In separating and numbering each of his quotations—with little mixing or play—most of Reality Hunger feels closer to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations than the vital new form the book calls for.” –“Reality Boredom: Why David Shields is Completely Right and Totally Wrong,” Lincoln Michel, The Rumpus
Things are not as they appear: Kutiman’s YouTube collage music; earnest tea drinkers rue the changing meaning of “tea party”; and a plant thought to eat sewer animals turns out to be the sewer
How did Bush-era torture policies affect our allies in the war on terror? Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director of MI5, made stinging remarks yesterday suggesting that the torture dilemma in which British intelligence is now enmeshed is an American product. The Independent reports:
During a lecture given at a meeting in the House of Lords, Dame Eliza said the British government had made an official complaint to Washington over the abuse of detainees. But no futher details have emerged on either side of the Atlantic of when this complaint was made, or what form it took.
In her speech, highly critical of the US’s conduct during the war on terror, the former secret service chief implied that the leadership in Washington was inspired by watching the TV espionage thriller 24. She said: “Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly watched 24″. Dame Eliza said: “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing.” She insisted that she had been unaware of what was going on until her retirement in 2007. One of her retrospective discoveries was the interrogation method used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When she asked her subordinates why the senior al-Qa’ida member was offering so much information, they told her he was “very proud of his achievements when questioned”. She added: “It wasn’t actually until after I retired that I read that he had been water-boarded 160 times.”
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Previously undisclosed e-mail messages turned over to the F.B.I. and Senate ethics investigators provide new evidence about Senator John Ensign’s efforts to steer lobbying work to the embittered husband of his former mistress and could deepen his legal and political troubles.
Mr. Ensign, Republican of Nevada, suggested that a Las Vegas development firm hire the husband, Douglas Hampton, after it had sought the senator’s help on several energy projects in 2008, according to e-mail messages and interviews with company executives.
The messages are the first written records from Mr. Ensign documenting his efforts to find clients for Mr. Hampton, a top aide and close friend, after the senator had an affair with his wife, Cynthia Hampton.
Chief Justice John Roberts embodies the values of the Court he heads. And public opinion polling shows that those values don’t sit well with most Americans. In Roberts’s world, law and morality have little in common. “What is morally just and right—that’s not my job,” he said to a youthful audience in Moscow, Idaho, about a year ago. The sentiment is reflected in Roberts’s rulings. Consider Citizens United, in which he found that corporations have human rights (more, indeed, than most humans) or Caperton v. Massey, in which Roberts concluded (in the minority this time) that there was nothing objectionable about a Supreme Court justice taking millions from the head of a mining company to secure his election and then throwing the case to benefit the mining company and its shareholders.
While Roberts’s sense of justice gives him much flexibility, it evidently requires that others respect and pay deference to him as its corporeal manifestation. So at a talk in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he landed a blow against Barack Obama, the man to whom he misadministered the oath of office on January 20, in a dazzling display of judicial incompetence: “The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.” The fact that Justice Alito chose not to heed those “requirements of protocol”—responding to the president’s remarks with a “not true”—of course merited no mention from the chief justice. But the President of the United States wielding political rhetoric in a speech before Congress and a nationwide television audience: shocking!
David Cole, reviewing the Department of Justice ethics reports on the torture lawyers, says that the almost exclusive focus on John Yoo and Jay Bybee is inappropriate. The report lets Yoo’s and Bybee’s successors off the hook, concluding that even though they approved pretty much the same torture techniques, they approved them in a manner consistent with the ethics standards applicable at the Department of Justice. (Both the OPR memo and the Margolis review have a lot of trouble identifying any ethics standards that are applicable at the Department of Justice, but that’s another matter.)
What is most disturbing about the torture memos is not that they employ strained reasoning or fail to cite this or that authority, but that they do so in the name of authorizing torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of human beings. Remarkably, neither the OPR nor Margolis directly considered the illegality of the conduct that was authorized by the memos. The OPR stated that it “did not attempt to determine and did not base our findings on whether…the Memos arrived at a correct result.” Margolis also did not address whether the conduct authorized was illegal. But surely that is the central issue.
Why, then, did the OPR and Margolis fail to take up the question of the legality of the brutality itself? Almost certainly because doing so would have implicated not only John Yoo and Jay Bybee, but all of the lawyers who approved these methods over the five-year course of their application, including, within the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Levin, and [Steven] Bradbury, Bybee’s successors as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the two attorneys general, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Notwithstanding their criticism of Yoo’s errors, all of these men concurred with the basic conclusion of the Yoo and Bybee memos that the tactics being used by the CIA were legitimate.
[MORE . . .]
Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show.
We must all work together to thwart PR Nazis; we must stop the identity theft killers; we must stop men from doing women’s hair
The d.j. hero of “Play Misty for Me,” Dave Garver, whispers so intimately into the microphone that an impressionable fan (Jessica Walter) imagines that she has a special bond with him. He sleeps with her a few times, only to discover that she’s a knife-wielding psychopath who won’t let go. This casually made picture featured plentiful views of Eastwood’s bare chest, which appeared in many movies, including “The Beguiled,” which he had made with Don Siegel just before “Dirty Harry.” In “The Beguiled,” Eastwood is a wounded Union soldier who is taken in by the itchy women of a girls’ school at the end of the Civil War. The two portraits of lusted-after men border on narcissism, though, in a surprising turn (which should have alerted us to where Eastwood was going), the hero in each case is a careless opportunist who refuses to take responsibility for the havoc he creates….“Play Misty for Me” ends with Dave Garver knocking his lover through a window and down Big Sur’s rocky cliffs. Eastwood was clearly telling both the studios and the public that they could admire but not possess him. –“Out of the West: Clint Eastwood’s shifting landscape,” David Denby, The New Yorker
A convincing rationale for why the Washington Post insists on “shoving [its] gay business” in your face; drink up, ladies (unless you like being fat); flying panty party!
The trickle of forgetfulness that seems to be slipping down through the electrical impulses of my brain is a swollen spring runoff in my mother. The people in her life are like pieces on a chessboard, and every time she goes to make a move she cannot remember which shape is the Bishop, or Queen, and how it is exactly the Knight is played. Even worse, every time she looks away, someone switches all the pieces around and when she looks back she immediately recognizes that none of the players are where she left them. That recognition, to see it, carries a certain poignancy. The unquestioned certainty of my mother’s life has been stalled and in the confusion she senses a checkmate….Our whole family went to my son’s graduation in Middlebury, Vermont, and over the course of the long weekend my mother asked if we were in Andover, Massachusetts, confusing this graduation for that of another grandchild she was slated to attend later in the month. Or she simply asked where we were. The morning of the graduation it rained hard but then stopped suddenly just in time for the ceremonies. As we drove the rented minivan towards Middlebury the sun cleared the sky and Vermont displayed its soft, green valleys and hills. “It’s so beautiful,” my mother said in awe. “I will remember this forever.” Or until 12:15, I thought, whichever comes first. –“Remembering Ray Borque, Eddie Lewis, Ploughshares
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Frakt, a JAG defense counsel who has been representing Gitmo prisoners, having been outed by Liz Cheney, confesses at Salon that he’s working for Al Qaeda. “The chance to actually be a U.S. government-paid spokesperson for al-Qaida under the guise of ‘promoting fairness, justice and the rule of law,’” he says, “was just too delicious an opportunity to pass up. I figured the military commissions at Guantánamo would be the perfect soapbox for me to espouse my terrorist ideology.”
Q: Didn’t you also represent another client, a juvenile?
A: Yes, I did represent another young Afghan named Mohammed Jawad, but he was a big disappointment also.
Q: How so?
A: Well, as it turned out, he wasn’t a member of al-Qaida, or even the Taliban. In fact, he wasn’t a terrorist at all. He didn’t even know any terrorists! The only real consolation with Mohammed was that the United States had tortured him, so I was able to exploit that for substantial propaganda value, but otherwise, he was a dud.
It’s not surprising—indeed, it’s even somewhat admirable—that Karl Rove’s new book focuses on burnishing the reputation of his boss, George W. Bush. The 608-page book covers a lot of turf, including the 2000 primaries and election; Rove savors his hard-fought victories over John McCain and Al Gore. In Rove’s recounting, he’s innocent of any meaningful role in the South Carolina smears against McCain, and the cherished missiles launched against Gore (including his supposed claims to have invented the Internet and to be behind Love Story)—now long debunked—get a careful rehearsing. Rove shows a fairly casual regard for the truth—a sense, rather, that there is a new sort of political truth. The insider understands that these are political fibs in the service of a mission. If the larger audience is duped by them, well, that is the essence of politics.
Rove is remarkably candid in identifying the issue that historians are likely to focus on in the Bush presidency: did he lie to take the country to war in Iraq? It’s not unusual for leaders to stretch the facts in the lead-up to a war—there is a need to present the justness of a nation’s cause, to build morale and resolve. But the key question is whether the case made for war—the casus belli—was honest or a series of distortions. Several alternatives were presented, but the key casus belli was the claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, and a pre-emptive attack was essential as an act of self-defense. Rove recognizes this. He writes:
Watching Avatar, I was continually reminded of Zizek’s observation in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, that the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth. “There’s no green there, they killed their mother,” we are solemnly informed at one point. Avatar is in some ways a reversal of Cameron’s Aliens. If the “bug-hunt” in Aliens was, as Virilio argued, a kind of rehearsal for the megamachinic slaughter of Gulf War 1, then Avatar is a heavyhanded eco-sermon and parable about US misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…. What we have in Avatar is another instance of corporate anti-capitalism such as I discussed in Capitalist Realism in relation to Wall-E. Cameron has always been a proponent of Hollywood anti-capitalism: stupid corporate interests were the villains in Aliens and Terminator 2 as they are in Avatar. Avatar is Le Guin-lite, a degraded version of the scenario that Le Guin developed in novels such as The Word For World Is Forest, The Dispossessed and City Of Illusions, but stripped of all Le Guin’s ambivalence and intelligence. –“They Killed Their Mother: Avatar as ideological symptom,” k-punk
“Hurt locker” comes from another ambiguously initiated, ambivalently received, military failure; save the Na’vi (they exist); poverty porn from Helen Levitt and James Agee
In 1962, the American Phillips Petroleum Company started looking into the possibility of drilling for oil under the Norwegian Sea. The decision was up to the King (no, really) and I can only assume that he gave his silent nod; a few years later the first big reserves were found. “The Oil Adventure” changed everything. Norway now has one of the world’s most advanced social welfare systems, and the population of 4.8 million enjoys higher living standards than ever. A semester at university costs about $100. There are state-subsidized scholarships for everyone, so students take out only small loans to cover their living expenses. Working parents receive a year’s paid maternity or paternity leave and universal health care assures that no one pays more than around $400 per year in medical expenses. The United Nations keep placing us at the top of their Human Development Index. When the Labor Party’s ski-loving Jens Stoltenberg was reelected prime minister last September, Norway’s stock market was rising and the unemployment rate hovered at 3 percent. –“Into the Woods,” Silje Bekeng, n+1
Rich senator, poor senator–what if?; once we recognize the puppy, must we prosecute him?; conservatives have 99 problems with 99 weeks of unemployment benefits; death of the aged
The rodents were stowaways on sealing and whaling ships that visited the island until the mid-20th century. When the hunters stopped coming, the rats were left to their own devices along with a small population of reindeer that had been brought for food and now roam wild. Without natural predators, the rat population has swollen to many million, eating their way through tens of millions of ground-nesting birds’ eggs and chicks in the process. As a result, the island’s endemic wildlife is under threat, and its only songbird, the South Georgia pipit, is on the brink of extinction…. Absolute eradication is the only option because rats breed rapidly. They can live for around two years, achieve sexual maturity at two months old and are able to produce seven litters of 8 to 10 offspring a year. Female rats reach menopause at around 18 months. Even in the harsh climate of South Georgia, a sexually mature female is likely to have around four litters a year. If just one couple survive, it will only take a few years before the island is overrun again.–“Extermination in Paradise,” Sanjida O’Connell, New Scientist
Miley Cyrus is deeper than you; Kid Rock pleads his innocence in Los Angeles; Sean Penn is a true humanitarian: “Do I hope that those people die screaming of rectal cancer? Yeah”
Former Bush Administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen used his space at the Washington Post to defend the McCarthyite smear campaign that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have launched against a group of Justice Department lawyers who did Guantánamo-related pro bono work:
Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.
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At Salon, Mark Benjamin reviews a cache of internal CIA documents giving directions on how to waterboard prisoners:
Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking—and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session—and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session—a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding—the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
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Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota’s runaway-acceleration problems. A Washington Post analysis shows that as many as 33 former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration employees and Transportation Department appointees left those jobs in recent years and now work for automakers as lawyers, consultants and lobbyists and in other jobs that deal with government safety probes, recalls and regulations.
The reach of these former agency employees is broad. They are on staff rosters for every major automaker and every major automotive trade group, and they appear as expert witnesses and legal counsel for the industry in major class-action lawsuits over auto safety…
No law bans these officials from moving straight from government into industry. But critics of the revolving-door practice say that it has contributed to flaws in federal oversight and enforcement.
Amid hundreds of rocket and mortar explosions that killed dozens of people throughout the country, Iraq held parliamentary elections. Large numbers of Sunnis, who had boycotted previous elections, voted. “We have experienced three wars before,” quipped one voter, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.” Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's coalition failed to secure a majority of seats, leaving his political future uncertain; the U.S. military said its plans for withdrawal remained “on track.”1
A memoir by Karl Rove said that the Bush Administration would not have started the Iraq war without the threat of weapons of mass destruction.2
Rampaging Nigerian Muslims slaughtered 500 Christians with machetes,3
and a Nigerian member of the Vatican choir admitted to having procured male prostitutes for an Italian government official working as a papal usher.4
Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Afghanistan to meet with President Hamid Karzai as U.S.-led forces prepared for an offensive in Kandahar. “There won't be a D-Day that is climactic,” Gates said. “It will be a rising tide of security as it comes.”5
Hamas banned male hairdressers from styling women's hair in Gaza.6
The movie’s denouement— the explosive ordnance disposal (E.O.D.) team responds to a massive truck bomb in the Green Zone— is so completely wrong in every respect that it borders on farce. Insurgents did not operate freely in the Green Zone. They would never have kidnapped a soldier in an area with thousands of U.S. troops. And they would never have hung around an active investigation scene with their weapons. No American E.O.D. team in existence (or any other three-man squad) would go charging alone down dark alleyways when there are hundreds of infantrymen at hand. –“Essay: How Not to Depict a War,” Michael Kamber, the New York Times
Baghdad election day; Harry Ransom Center acquires David Foster Wallace archive; Victorian cut-and-paste (via)
The U.S. Postal Service is at a tipping point due to the combined effects of the economic recession, increased use of electronic communications, and its obligations to prepay Retiree Health Benefits. Always dedicated to providing reliable, affordable, high-quality universal service, the Postal Service has developed and begun implementing a range of cost-reducing and revenue-generating initiatives. But these aren’t enough to close the financial gap between revenue and costs. For the American public to continue receiving affordable universal postal services from a self-sufficient Postal Service, these issues need to be addressed quickly and comprehensively with legal and regulatory action. –“Envisioning America’s Future Postal Service “ (via)
How to make a steampunk book cover (with gargoyles); “Väinämöinen sings a ship”; Gordon Lightfoot on “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (it wasn’t a hatchway)
“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me.” It was March 1987, and Milt Bearden was sitting in a spare interview room at the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Bearden was then the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, serving as the link between Washington and the U.S.-funded Afghan rebels bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had come to see the mujahedin’s most lethal warlord, a radical Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. No other Afghan leader had received more money from the United States than Hekmatyar, yet he showed his Western patrons precious little gratitude. He claimed to despise the United States as much as the Soviet Union, and, while visiting the United Nations two years earlier, he had refused an invitation to meet Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. Now Bearden was hearing grumbling from Washington about why the United States was financing an anti-American zealot known for splashing acid in the faces of unveiled women. He decided it was time to confront a man he considered “the darkest” of the Afghan warlords. And Hekmatyar was convinced he’d come to snuff him. –“Our Man in Kabul? The sadistic Afghan warlord who wants to be our friend,” by Michael Crowley, The New Republic
Back in 2008, Michael Goldfarb and others on the right tried a typically McCarthyite tactic against candidate Barack Obama. Obama was assailed for a supposed relationship with Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, described in the National Review as “a former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat” and the “founder” of the Arab-American Action Network. Most of their essential claims about Khalidi were false. In fact, Khalidi is well known as a critic of human rights abuses within the Palestinian community; he had nothing to do with AAAN, an organization that provides English language lessons to immigrants and other social services to the indigent; and Khalidi was more closely tied to John McCain than to Obama. Under McCain’s guidance, the International Republican Institute supported Khalidi’s Palestinian Center, an operation geared to raising civil consciousness and engagement among West Bank Palestinians. In short, the effort blew up in their faces.
Cycle forward a year and a half, and we find Goldfarb with William Kristol providing the public relations “brains” for Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe. Last week they launched a new attack line, going after the “Gitmo 9”—a group of lawyers, now working for the Obama Administration, who “voluntarily represented terrorists.” This is another in a series of attacks against Eric Holder and the Justice Department, which in fact remains the main target of Keep America Safe. The technique, again, is typically McCarthyite. There are unknown people deep inside the government whose loyalty is suspect, it insinuates. They have infiltrated the Justice Department (which the ad calls “Department of Jihad”). “Whose values do they share?” it asks.
When the White House announced last week it would be losing the services of Lewis A. Sachs, one of the president’s top economic advisers, the reason given for Sachs’s departure was that his work was largely complete. “He’s leaving now that markets have stabilized and Secretary [Timothy] Geithner has had time to set up a permanent team,” Treasury Department spokesman Andrew Williams said.
But Sachs’s quiet exit, reported in a blog entry on the New York Times web site, comes without any apparent next move for the Wall Street veteran, except for what he told the Times was his desire for time to “catch up on some sleep.”
Not factoring into the decision, Williams said, were recent reports suggesting Sachs’s old employer could be the subject of a federal probe. A December Times report said federal officials were then in the early stages of an investigation into companies that sold a complex breed of securities known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, and then made financial bets against them.
House Appropriations defense subcommittee member James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) works hard at fundraising: Two to three times a week, he telephones contributors to ask for more. Yet, according to the account he supplied to the Office of Congressional Ethics last year, he is unaware of “who made donations” or how much they gave, and so that information plays no role in his earmarking — the systematic granting of public funds for mostly private purposes.
Fellow subcommittee member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) similarly presides over fundraisers arranged by his staff for defense firms and lobbyists every three months or so, according to his office’s account. An aide in charge of Dicks’s earmarks attends the fundraising events. But Dicks and the aide told investigators they were unaware of the substantial overlap between defense industry contributions to Dicks and his earmarks to contributors.
When financial reform legislation finally lands on the Senate floor, a provision that advocates call the single most important item for Main Street investors will probably have been banished from the ponderous bill.
That provision — a requirement for stock brokers and insurance agents to act in the best interest of their clients — was part of a 1,100-page draft bill unveiled by Senate banking committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) in November. Since then, industry and consumer groups have quietly lobbied members on the issue, even as much of the public debate has focused on oversight of big banks and the creation of a consumer protection agency.
I’m confident we will all land on our feet. And I’m certain that the experience will be an opportunity for us to find strength we didn’t know we had. I’ve met us. And we are, to be frank, pretty amazing. But the dream of Biglaw is hard to let go. And after all, there isn’t necessarily any shame in wanting to make money. Some of the wealthiest Americans have been its greatest philanthropists. Bill Gates has retired from Microsoft and dedicated a large portion of his financial empire to addressing global warming and poverty. And Tony Stark created his Iron Man suit to fight the spread of technological weaponry the sales of which, well, financed the creation of his Iron Man suit. Fine, that one isn’t very persuasive. Still, I don’t think we should be judged for wanting to be Biglaw associates with the money and power that would eventually have brought. Maybe we just wanted to be Iron Man. Think about it. –“Unemployed law student will work for $160k plus benefits,” Anonymous 3L, The Harvard Law Record
Wouldn’t you like to be a “Lawyer/Winner,” too?; video: sea scavengers feed on seal carcass; tracing a Supreme error from law school to Radar
According to Doug Steele, the bar’s Canadian owner, “at the Duck you got laid even if you didn’t want to.” On Ladies’ Night, the doors opened at seven p.m., but the only people let in were women, as long as they were at least 16 years old. They’d drink for free. At nine, the men were allowed in. It wasn’t until the metro stations opened the next morning that it ended, and in the meantime, anything went. “Orgiastic” is an insufficient description. The only appropriate word seems to be Caligulan, and not just because the Duck was situated steps from Lubyanka, the former prison and Soviet torture chamber that now housed the F.S.B. The action was mostly elevated, according to Vlad Baseav, an early Exile general manager, with women and men alike dancing on the bar and on the tables, disrobing on the bar and on the tables, having sex on the bar and on the tables, fighting on the bar and on the tables, and then crashing in various states of undress onto the floor scrum. “They would get up and continue dancing, blood everywhere,” Baseav says. Steele recalls a night when the deputy head of a Moscow police unit, drunk beyond all reckoning, emptied his pistol into the ceiling and made everybody lie on the floor for three hours. Lavelle claims he saw a man stabbed to death next to him one night. “No one thought it was unusual.” –“Lost Exile,” James Verini, Vanity Fair
Style Wars return in London; the David Foster Wallace audio project; how to charm Japanese consumers: “Happy Bags” of green bean Kitto-Katso bars; Pac-man sings
Joan Copjec’s take on Kiarostami crystallizes just how his films are seen in such a deeply political light in the West—and also how this vision is so alluring. These alien people with their alien logic have, she writes, “a different distribution of the visible and the invisible.” This claim worries me, because what is unseen by Copjec—“the hejab covering women that obscures them from the sight of men to whom they are not related”—leads to a celebration of this “alien logic of the look.” Despite her intention to champion Kiarostami’s work, her gesture is an unwittingly exoticizing one. Thus, Kiarostami’s becomes a cinema that anyone with Orientalist urges—from the browsers of Anthropologie clothing catalogs to the addicts of the New York Times’s Sunday travel section to the fedayeen of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations—can cherish. –“Watching Shrek in Tehran,” Brian T. Edwards, The Believer
Iran arrests director Jaffar Panahi; Chinese anxiety over the citizenship of Yao Ming’s baby; chances are, she won’t end up in Chen Mingjing’s Kingdom of the Little People
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Also: William H. Gass and Philip Levine |