Monthly Archives: December 2008

Best of the 12.08.08 Issue: Disaster Capitalism and Its Discount Garments

This is the issue with Barry Blitt’s cover image of Barack Obama interviewing the dogs, a flight of fancy that manages to capture something essential about the serious, careful president-elect, I thought. I found the juxtaposition of Larissa MacFarquhar’s “Profile”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar of Naomi Klein, author of _The Shock Doctrine,_ and Patricia Marx’s “look”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_marx at recessionary fashion most intriguing.
In transit from West Coast to East, “Benjamin Chambers”:http://emdashes.com/katharine-wheel/ was able to register his impressions via iPhone (I really must acquire one of those things):
“Some things I’ve liked this week:
“P. 19, brief review of a show of artifacts from 12 cultures circa the Bronze age. Quote: ‘Battalions of pitilessly educational wall texts and labels beseige about three hundred and fifty often tiny, mostly terrific objects in ivory, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and lots else. Duly benumbed, you may slip the odd item of power or caprice into a pocket of memory, to take home.’
“E. Kolbert’s TOTT “comment”:http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/12/08/081208taco_talk_kolbert on the Big 3 bailout is sharp, a useful summary, and challenges Obama to address the root issues. Quote: ‘It would, of course, be foolish to allow the American economy to collapse in order to make a point. And it’s possible to conclude that the Big Three deserve on every front to fail and still decide to rescue them. But such a decision will itself be a form of temporizing, and will only pass the problems on to the next Administration. Real change—as opposed to the kind in slogans—is hard and, by definition, disruptive. If Obama has any intention of fulfilling his campaign promises, sooner or later he’s going to have to face up to that.’
“Graeme Wood’s “Afghan piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_wood feels truncated, but nails the difficulty of the forgotten war and the drawbacks of pitting ethnic minorities against each other. Also chock full of mini-stories that cry out for dramatization: e.g., the police unit that took heavy losses, and, shamed into patrolling, sang songs and wrapped their rifles in flowers. Or the army unit that attack a position and steal grapes along the way.”
If you have strong feelings about an article in any current issue, by all mean “write us”:mailto:poti.emdashes@gmail.com and let us know!

Shalom Auslander at Nextbook Covers Israeli Views on Turkey

“Nextbook”:http://www.nextbook.org is a sharp site we like with a fresh take on Jewish subjects. They’ve got a new “piece”:http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1795 on Israel by Shalom Auslander that is really on the ball; be warned that that description is punningly intended. If you are familiar with his work, that may not come as a surprise.
Speaking of which, I “mentioned this”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/new-yorker-festival-klam-leona.php during the Festival, but—Matthew Klam cited a work by Auslander in which he discusses good and evil and how they are related, as if they behaved like people, saying that “Light and Dark are buddies, and they hang out after work.” Anyone know where this comes from? (Perhaps Klam himself will let us know.) I’d like to read that.

Two New Yorker Storytellers, on a BBC Podcast

Jonathan Taylor writes:
There’s plenty of Malcolm Gladwell to go around these days, so I might not have singled out a recent BBC Radio 3 Night Waves podcast (mp3 here. Update: Not anymore, although it seems still possible to get the episode by subscribing to the podcast) with an interview of him, if it didn’t have another segment of New Yorker interest: a really perceptive discussion of Saul Steinberg by British illustrator Quentin Blake, best known to many for his gleeful collaborations with Roald Dahl. The occasion is a Steinberg exhibition going on at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Oh My God: Sasha Frere-Jones Unveils His 2008 List

Sasha Frere-Jones has “posted”:http://www.sashafrerejones.com/2007/12/bumping.html his top 18 songs and top 24 albums of 2008. Partial explanation on his _New Yorker_ “blog”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2008/12/the-best-record.html. My tastes and his hardly overlap, but I _adore_ his #2 song, “Oh My God,” by Ida Maria. For some reason the list is dated December 29, 2007, which makes him look _incredibly_ prescient!

Say We’re Not Sanguine, Joe!

Emily writes:
You can’t always get what you want, as this extra-chilly December is teaching us so ruthlessly. Sometimes, though, you can still post on your nearly four-year-old blog. Yes, four this very month! Happy birthday month to us!
Five things I admired today:
1. From Inquirer.net (“the official news website of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine’s most widely circulated broadsheet”), a reminiscence by Corazon P. Ong whose headline says it well: “I wrote E.B. White and he wrote back.”
2. David Remnick quoted in the Observer, answering the New York Times‘s Joe Nocera (who, as the Observer puts it, “asked how each of the them could be so sanguine about the future”) at a panel held by the Newhouse School of Communication:

“Joe, no!” he said. “(A), we’re not sanguine. Or blithe. We think about it all the time. There are meetings about it all the time. We’re each thinking about this. Constantly. The quesiton that Ken asked was ‘Do your magazines have a future and are they in any way different than newspapers? I think magazines that mean something are going to find a way to have a future. … Sanguine or blithe about it? That’s not the way to describe it, Joe.”

God bless you, David Remnick. That is exactly what it is like. And magazines will find a future. We won’t go down so easy!
4. Speaking of people with a sense of humor and diverse musical tastes, here’s LP Cover Lover.
5. Hillary Chute—whose Art Spiegelman interview we’re featuring all week on Print‘s website—interviewed the radiant and irrepressible Lynda Barry for the current issue of The Believer. Buy the issue; get a taste of the interview here. I was so happy, amidst the doldrums of fall, to witness Barry and Matt Groening being delirious together during the most recent New Yorker Festival. The magic of some occasions really does make up for the bad times.