A swell story by Subir Roy that begins with parental suspicion and ends with New Yorker cartoons:

Our daughter is up to no good, I told my wife. She was also getting worried, she confessed. It was not as if our daughter was openly up to some mischief, defiantly joining the spoilt generation.

Even that would have been a relief. What had got the two of us into a huddle was she wouldn’t say what exactly she was up to.

There were these mysterious goings on between her and different groups of friends, sometimes big and sometimes small, with one or two boys thrown in. Of course, we were broad-minded.
…
Will you buy us a New Yorker so that we can get some ideas? [She said.] I was impressed they had heard the name and went and got her a copy from Premier bookstore, poorer by Rs 400, courtesy the owner who gave me a Rs 50 discount.

Then a couple of days later when I asked our daughter what she and her friends thought of the magazine, she grinned from ear to ear…. Find out what happens to this errant youth here.

Perhaps Roy would have been safer steering her toward The New York Times Upfront instead, marketed by Scholastic, which claims it’s “more current than textbooks and more appropriate for teen readers than newsstand magazines.” Because Time and Newsweek print so many photos of ill-behaved celebrities?

A view of the New Yorker: The little magazine romances every generation [Business Standard (India)]
Letter From Tokyo: Shopping Rebellion: What the Kids Want [Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker]
Nineteenth-Century American Children & What They Read: Some of Their Magazines [Merry Coz. A joke from the June 1836 issue of Parley’s: “A couple of jolly sailors just landed in New York, saw a couple of men employed in pumping the water out of a cellar. Halloo, Tom, says one of them. What is’t, says Tom. Why, said he, New York has sprung a leak, and they are pumping her out.”]

There are many places on the Internet for reading bad news, and I salute them. At emdashes, you can often (though not always) read good news instead. And news doesn’t get much better than this:

Universal Home Video has announced it will release 25th, no, a 26th Anniversary Edition of The Jerk, starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Jackie Mason on July 26 for a suggested price of $19.98.

The film will be presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Extras will include two featurettes: Learn How to Play Tonight You Belong to Me [it’s one thing to have the ukulele tabs, quite another to play it properly] and The Lost Filmstrips of Father Carlos Las Vegas de Cordova, along with production notes.

A Jerk of a DVD [IGN DVD]
The Jerk—The Script [A Movie Script Archive]
Be a Cat Juggler! [Diamond Jim Productions Magical Entertainment]

Categories: Movies, Martin

Fawaz Turki on the fisticuffs at the recent PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature:

And, yes, participants exchanged political ideas as well—or hurled them at each other. There was that heated debate between Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley who had filed repeatedly from Baghdad and authored the book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror. and the Iraq-born commentator, Kanan Makiya. Danner opposed the invasion of Iraq, but Makiya supported it, claiming improbably “this is a country that now has a hope it never had before.”

The Iraqi, however, was outmatched intellectually by Danner, who had all the pertinent facts and figures at his fingertips, facts and figures that he proceeded to throw at Makiya like a boxer in the ring—a right to the midsection followed by an upper cut here and a left hook there. There was nothing that our pro-war Iraqi activist could do, as the blows rained down on him, than cover up. It was a classic case of an overmatched fighter trapped in the corner of the ring waiting for it to be over.

This is, of course, not the first time the two have taken opposite sides. Michael Massing reflected on the November 2002 forum on Iraq at NYU a few weeks afterward (this has a sort of Sondheim quality, doesn’t it?):

The son of a prominent Iraqi architect who came to this country in the late 1960s to attend MIT and never left, Makiya has spent the past fifteen years publicizing the horrors taking place in his native land. In Republic of Fear (1989) and Cruelty and Silence (1993) he chronicled the instruments of repression used by Saddam Hussein to brutalize his people and to suppress the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings after the Gulf War.

Now Makiya warned the audience of 200 that he would be striking a “discordant note” with the rest of the panel. “When you look at this coming war from the point of view of the people who are going to pay the greatest price—the people of Iraq—they overwhelmingly want it,” Makiya declared. He discussed the steps he and other Iraqi exiles were taking to convince the Bush Administration to make the installation of a democratic government in Baghdad one of its chief war aims. And he urged those in attendance to support that goal. A war to overthrow Saddam, he said, “could have enormous transformative power throughout the Middle East.” If there is even a “sliver of a chance—even 5 to 10 percent—that what I’m talking about might happen,” Makiya said, those committed to bringing democracy and justice to the world have a “moral obligation” to support military action in Iraq. Amid applause from the audience, the other panelists shifted uncomfortably.
…
“If we’re going to invade, the President has a responsibility to make his case—to explain how long it will take, and what resources we’ll have to put in,” says Mark Danner, who has written extensively about Haiti and Bosnia. “He’s not doing that. We have to read about postwar plans in the New York Times. It’s remarkable.” Danner, who in early October joined such other liberals as Derek Bok, Aryeh Neier and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in signing an ad in the Times opposing the war, says, “The most forceful argument for going to war is helping the Iraqi people. But that’s not the reason for this war. I don’t remember anybody in the Administration talking about the Iraqi people before August. Rather, it’s about America’s larger strategic goals in the region. They’re going to get rid of this guy, then get out. During the 2000 campaign, George Bush was totally against nation-building. And I don’t see any sign of change in that.”

Word and World in New York [Arab News]
The Moral Quandary: Anti-imperialism vs. Humanitarianism [The Nation]
New Yorker pieces by Mark Danner
Kanan Makiya interview [Frontline, 2002]

Intellectuals are supposedly moving from Boston to Washington. I’m skeptical. Says the Times:

Louis Menand, the New Yorker writer and Harvard literature professor, who has also worked in Washington, said that while the capital has “this reputation of being wonky and boring,” this can be appealing for practitioners of ideas. Washington journalists especially “become suddenly interesting in a way they might not be in New York,” where they are competing with artists, actors, restaurateurs, advertising executives and Wall Street moguls for prestige, he said.

As is often the case, there’s no trend in this Times trend piece, since The Atlantic‘s move from Boston to Washington “was driven by economics, not symbolism or a desire for cachet.” Saying Boston’s no longer “trying”—as if this were a performance review—is pure silliness. Even if what Menand says is true, there’s something defeatist about it—it’s like giving up on New York men and moving to Alaska to find a husband (or dialing up a faraway mail-order bride). Sure, tired people starved for conversation not about tax cuts will find your monograph riveting, but will that satisfy after the first few heady conversations? Of course there are smart folks who read in Washington, but you can’t convince me that Boston still doesn’t have more big thinkers, block for block and bar for bar, than D.C. I’m very fond of the proud northern city myself, though I lived there for only six days before moving to blizzardy Buffalo, NY. On the seventh day, I nested.

Washington’s Egghead Quotient Keeps Growing [NYT]