May 2012
28 posts
foreign flicks of indeterminate quality
After watching Maiwann’s “Polisse” at E Street the other day—which is excellent, who doesn’t enjoy a punitively depressing film about the Child Protection Unit in Paris—it was suggested (and seconded, and ayed) that foreign films are consistently better than American films. Higher-quality, more engaging, just plain better. I don’t watch enough movies to adjudicate this but I guess there are three...
Count the acts of selfless civic duty performed in this moderator’s forum on why George Bush’s “You forgot Poland” retort to John Kerry in 2004 does, in fact, deserve its own Wikipedia page.
What to do if your hand gets torn off at a plastic-shredding plant in Mumbai. From Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers:
Among Saki Naka’s acres of sheds were metal-melting and plastic-shredding machines owned by men in starched kurtas—white kurtas, to announce the owners’ distance from the filth of their trade. Some of the workers at the plants were black-faced from carbon dust and...
Another great bit from Caro’s LBJ book was this description of an earlier, quainter era where congressmen could still end up homeless and penniless after leaving Congress:
[LBJ] talked about how he kept seeing around Washington former congressmen who had lost their seats—as, he said, he would inevitably one day lose his—and were working in low-paying, demeaning jobs; over and over again he...
LBJ threatens the press
Maybe this was just something “everybody knew,” but reading the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson biography, The Passage of Power, the bits about how LBJ threatened and bribed the press seemed shocking to me. For instance:
* A female reporter at the Dallas Times-Herald, Margaret Mayer, starts snooping around LBJ’s corrupt business empire shortly after Johnson becomes...
“…and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings.”
—Lawrence Durrell, Justine
—Dandy Warhols, “Minnesoter,”...
Book notes and factoids
Some notes, quotes, and interesting bits from Christopher Leinberger’s The Option of Urbanism (2009):
* “If you just so happened to buy the United States of America, you would have to write a check for over $200 trillion. Of that amount, you would be paying about $70 trillion for the built environment, or thirty-five percent of all assets in the U.S. economy.” (16)
* In the 1970s, arguably one...
Being tax free isn't all it's cracked to be
An interesting bit from Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain (2004) on why taxes are so important to a country’s development—and why petrostates that don’t need to collect taxes suffer:
When a state develops the ability to collect taxes, the bureaucracy and mechanisms it creates are expensive. They perpetuate their existence by diligently collecting as much money as possible and...
How did Simón Bolívar die?
Hugo Chávez long had a pet theory that Bolívar was poisoned, assassinated by traitors. The theory turned out to be baseless:
On January 2008, President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez set up a commission to investigate theories indicating that Bolívar could have been the victim of an assassination. On several occasions, Chávez has claimed that Bolívar was in fact poisoned by “New Granade...
Tom Scocca offers one theory for why Maurice Sendak’s books were so powerful—the lack of backstory:
In “Where the Wild Things Are,” the masterpiece among masterpieces of the late Maurice Sendak, the word that first summons magic is a simple “his”: “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind / and another,” the opening pages read. Not “ a wolf suit”; certainly not “the...
A letter to the editor in New Scientist takes rather cantankerous issue with some recent claims:
“Why are humans the smartest animals on Earth?” you ask (24 March, p 3). Suppose any animal, in less than 2 million years, changed its environment so thoroughly that not only did many other species die out, but the existence of the animal itself was endangered. Would we call that animal...
