Like this one:

I witnessed a very strange phenomenon today while on a break from work. It was cold outside, so I stood against the loading docks of a largely uninhabited office on 41st street to get away from the wind. Naturally, a small group of pigeons were there first…. Cont’d.

Of course, I’m linking to this because it has a timely connection to “Little Wing,” Susan Orlean’s nicely written piece about homing pigeons and their admirers from this week’s magazine. As I read I envisioned a Charlie Kaufman screenplay with pigeon fanciers standing in for orchid thieves, and mentorship of the long-haired little girl from Boston replacing clandestine romance with wild John Laroche. Meanwhile, remember the pigeon-themed caption-contest cartoon? “And tomorrow I’ll teach you to build a nest.” See, there’s a benevolent pigeon right there. Before you judge the next pigeon you see, take a minute to admire its coloring, its placidity, its iridescent feathers. You’ll be impressed.

In FAIR’s excellent summary of 20 Stories That Made a Difference (“20 news stories published since FAIR’s 1986 debut that had a major impact on society—for good or for ill”), this recap of Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman’s brave and honorable campaign to spread the word about the outrages in East Timor:

7. The Dili Massacre

Following the U.S.-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, U.S. news media maintained a virtual blackout for over 15 years about the occupation and the atrocities occurring in the tiny island country (Extra!, 11/12/93). But in 1991, three journalists forced East Timor back on the media map and into the public consciousness.

On November 12, Allan Nairn of the New Yorker, Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio and British filmmaker Max Stahl attended a peaceful funeral procession in the East Timorese capital of Dili that turned deadly when Indonesian military opened fire on the crowd and killed more than 250. Nairn and Goodman were beaten but managed to escape, as did Stahl, and their eyewitness reports and video of the massacre alerted the Western world to the dire situation in East Timor, sparking a grassroots movement opposing U.S. support for the Indonesian occupation.

Though the mainstream media’s newfound attention to East Timor was initially slight, Goodman and Nairn continued to doggedly pursue the story throughout the ’90s, with Nairn repeatedly returning to East Timor to file reports despite an Indonesian order barring his entry. His reporting helped to keep the story on the radar, and in 1999, the U.S. finally suspended all military ties with Indonesia, which promptly pulled out from East Timor.

Here’s their 2005 update. Nairn is one handsome journalist, incidentally. Even more so because he’s so damn full of integrity.

From the press release:

PHILIP GOUREVITCH WILL DISCUSS JOURNALISTS’ ROLE AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE AT HUNTER COLLEGE DISTINGUISHED WRITERS SERIES

Gourevitch, editor of the The Paris Review, former New Yorker political reporter and author to appear at Hunter College, Tuesday, February 28, at 7:00 PM.

NEW YORK – The Paris Review editor and author Philip Gourevitch will discuss his most recent book, Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance (co-authored with James Shinn), and the role of journalists as agents of social change, Tuesday, February 28, 7:00 PM, at the Hunter College’s Ida K. Lang Recital Hall, located on the fourth floor, Hunter North Building, entrance is on the 69th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. To reserve seats, please call the Hunter College Special Events Office at 212.772.4007 or email the office at spevents@hunter.cuny.edu.

The editor of The Paris Review, Gourevitch is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, where he covered the 2004 presidential campaign. He is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the recipient of National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and a Guardian First Book Award.

Gourevitch will be appearing as part of The 2006 Hunter College Distinguished Writers Series, presented by Hunter President Jennifer J. Raab and the MFA Program in Creative Writing, directed by Peter Carey, the MFA’s program’s director.

Also appearing in the series will be novelist authors Junot Diaz (March 13), Eva Hoffman (March 21) and Jonathan Franzen (April 4). The Series will conclude with a Poetry Blast on May 4, featuring Tom Sleigh, Sharon Olds, C.K. Williams, Robert Pinsky and others.

Things I’ve gotten word of recently:

1) This Macalester College student objects to Caitlin Flanagan’s characterization of hip-hop in her recent Atlantic piece about teenage girls and oral sex. That’s right, people googling “teenage girls oral sex,” this is the destination for all your honorable research needs. Writes the student columnist, Tinbete Ermyas: “Flanagan notes that it is this rap culture that has helped to disrupt and saturate ‘poor and middle class’ culture in America through a ‘prison-yard’ genre that helps ‘brutalize’ young girls in America…. Wow, those are fightin’ words.”

2) In a story about our, uh, constitutional right to free speech: “The ejection of two women from the U.S. Capitol for wearing message T-shirts during President Bush’s State of the Union speech this week was the latest incident in a growing trend of stifling dissent…. Silencing dissent isn’t unique to the national government. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once ordered city buses to remove an ad for the New Yorker magazine that made fun of him.”

Clarification! A friend writes:

Re: your blog this morning–you should add an addendum that the Mercury News got just about everything wrong in its citation of the Giuliani episode with New York magazine (as opposed to the New Yorker, as they said. Can you imagine the New Yorker putting ads on the fronts–not the sides–of buses? Ads that make fun of Guiliani?) Of course, they’re also wrong that Giuliani got the ads off the buses. He didn’t. He tried in the courts, and failed. So “ordering” the buses to remove the ads isn’t technically accurate either. Oh, poor, poor Mercury News!

The New York mag campaign, from 1997 or 1998, was by DeVito-Verdi, and the tagline was “Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.” Big whoop, right? Shows how thin-skinned Guiliani is.

3) Speaking of Manchester United, the multitalented David Beckham liked both cash and girls at 16.

4) New Sparrow anthology! “It’s high time that Sparrow, the poet, journalist and ‘prose-provocateur,’ was dragged into the harsh commercial light of day. This way we can pick over the refuse of his political and cultural commentary and say that he was better back in the 1970s when he wrote for a Manhattan weekly, and in the early days of the Unbearables Assembling Magazine, the Literary Supplement of the Revolutionary Poultry Overview (pro-Poland) and the New Yorker (after browbeating, protesting and generally badgering poetry editor Alice Quinn).”

5) An AlwaysOn discussion heading reads: “Love, Sponsorship, Magazines, and Jazz: Variations on a theme of advertising stimulated by an interesting talk by Jim Morris on Advertising given on Coyote Hill Roard last week plus the pay-for-spam developments of this.” Commenter Mark Plakias writes:

Jim Morris, currently Dean of Carnegie Mellon West…gave one of the Thursday afternoon talk[s] at PARC last week. The topic was advertising, and the title, Advertising as Flirtation…. Showing the first magazine with advertising – for those of you who said Benjamin Franklin take an extra cookie – Morris argued that the heyday of the medium was in the 1950’s.
…
Now, a short digression. You want to talk about magazines, how about arguably the most famous one of all – the New Yorker. Yup, I’m one of those people that bought the entire corpus on 8 DVDs (great packaging I might add). Download the reader, fire up the search tool, enter “Coltrane.” Bang, you’re into a Whitney Balliet (whom I never did like) review of a live Town Hall concert in ’57, not just Trane but Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and Art Blakey – and it’s clear that Balliet can describe what’s happening in very clear prose, even if it is totally orthogonal to his aesthetics. And I sort of soften a bit to the late tres trad jazz reviewer of the New Yorker (ahem, D. Remick [sic], who would that person be now? isn’t the ‘stuff it in the listings’ paucity of jazz coverage in the magazine a bit of a scandal?).

6) Not a link, but a loss: just as David Remnick and the other framers of the DVD archive (and then reviewers) predicted we all would, I have surrendered my collection of 2003-05 New Yorkers to the recycling wing of the Sanitation Department. All that’s left is what’s arrived in ’06, a few vintage beauties (Salinger, “Professor Sea Gull”), and, of course, my eight archive discs, shiny and flat as retro-futurist money and full of possibility. I feel good, yet empty. I will execute whimsical screen grabs till I feel better. Farewell, sweet print!

1) David Remnick’s interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, originally in BlackBook;

2) Audio: Tad Friend talks to On the Media’s Xeni Jardin about fast cars, and not the Tracey Chapman kind;

3) Only tangentially related to The New Yorker (although, as I try to prove daily, everything is, really): this funny response from “coyotelibrarian” to a Chronicle of Higher Education story about the sinister side of the website Rate My Professors:

Fun with RMP

Rate My Professor (RMP) has needlessly become a source of anxiety for many instructors. If you’re unhappy with your RMP ratings, then make up some of your own!

After all, a disgruntled student could load your profile with multiple bad reviews, so it’s clearly unfair to have anything important depend on these ratings. Rather than worry about RMP, have some fun with it.

Of course, if you’re not comfortable making up comments out of thin air, borrow some from colleagues at other schools substituting your name for theirs. Thus:

“Prof. [Your Name Here] is a legend. It was an honor to have her as an instructor” [Borrowed from Joyce Carol Oates’ RMP profile]

“If you miss Prof. [YNH’s] class, you’d do well to open a vein. There’s no one on earth who shoots straighter, digs deeper, and years later, I still feel her influence daily. Get your act together, and take her courses.” [Borrowed from Camille Paglia’s profile]

“Prof. [YNH’s] seminar is an experience more than a class. It’s intense and relatively easy if you remember to agree with him. Worth taking just to be in the presence of such a large intellect (and ego).” [Borrowed from Harold Bloom’s profile]

So reward yourself — you deserve it! (and if you don’t deserve it, you probably need it more than those who do.)

No need to scrap the movie version! Haven’t the Warner brass seen Tristram Shandy? Of course aMilLitPee should still be a movie—about Frey’s constantly interfering fantasy life, Giant Superego Oprah (played, with FX, by herself), the actor playing Frey, Frey himself in lots of cameos (American Splendor), angry critics and publishers played by better-looking actors, lots of swirly drug moments with a good indie-rock soundtrack, and, sure, rehab. Shattered Glass meets Zelig meets Play It Again, Sam meets Prozac Nation meets Eternal Sunshine meets Donnie Darko, and it can’t fail.

What a tasteless headline! I considered worse. For those without Atlantic subscriptions, Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Paul Ruditis’ book Rainbow Party (about, as Flanagan puts it, “the teenage oral-sex craze”) is also on the Powell’s Books website. The piece fascinated and irritated me. I’ll write more about that if I get a chance.

Since I last wrote about The Atlantic, by the way, my subscription kicked in, and I’m enjoying it tremendously. I’d let a few years lapse since I last read it regularly, and it strikes me now as essential, a slightly uneven but adventurous and vital roundup of new and serious thought. Overall, a harmonious complement to the NYer (yes, I know there are other magazines; I’m talking about these two specifically). I like the sidebars, for instance. What are people reading in other parts of the world? They tell you. That’s news I want, and here it is in a colorful graphic; that part of the magazine is like USA Today for the philosophically bookish.

Meanwhile, even this emphatic fan of Caitlin Flanagan isn’t so sure about her New Yorker essays.

Via Moldawer, a great blog by a woman cabbie, New York Hack. She posts some beautiful photos of sights seen en route, and her records of spirited conversations will remind you relationships between cabbies and passengers need not be either silent or contentious. For instance:

On a related note, I once drove a woman home who told me she had married her cab driver. He picked her up and they made a connection. Numbers were exchanged, dates went on, and eventually a marriage was had. At the time of our conversation, they had been married for nine years.

Actually, I can’t remember the last time a cab driver and I had anything but a good conversation. It’s like “bad service” in restaurants—funny how people who begin the interaction in a friendly way so rarely experience it. Every cab driver I ask tells me that the rude people and awful tippers are mainly the rich. Sad. Also, I’m sure you’re too intelligent to repeat this ignorant cliché, but for emdashes’ non-New York readers, New York cabbies are far from bad drivers, and their English is pretty damn fluent. (Maybe you just can’t decipher accents?) My aunt, who in the ’70s supported her acting career by driving a cab in New York, agrees. She thinks there were more female cabbies then, too. I wonder why that is?

My friend Liza Featherstone helped edit a book by Biju Mathew called Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, which I’m looking forward to reading and which, of course, is the book whose book party the great Ben McGrath covered for Talk of the Town:

Exactly what the full range of party chatter was is tough to say, because a variety of languages were spoken, but an interloper, with a little persistence, was able to discern that most drivers would probably disagree with the cheery characterization of the yellow cab (made at a recent design forum at Parsons) as “New York’s movable public space.” A fairer, if blunter, slogan might be: “Our workspace, where you annoy and disrespect us.”

“They treat the car like they’re slobs,” a driver whose handle on the Bengal Cabbie Association’s CB radio channel is Babar said of his passengers. He added that those who sit in the front seat, and who make radio requests, are usually drunk. Drunk passengers occasionally throw up, and the smell lingers for weeks.

“There are so many things,” Rizwan Raja, a Pakistani driver, said, rattling off a list of his pet peeves: putting one’s feet up on the partition, smoking, crossing the street lackadaisically. Requesting multiple stops is also frowned upon. “These people come out of expensive, posh bars, where one beer is twenty dollars, but they make groups together so they can share a taxi and save a couple of dollars,” Raja said. “ ‘Three stops’—that really, really blows me off.” Tips, ever since the fare increase, have been meagre: “Sometimes forty cents, sometimes twenty cents.”

Raja went on, “The worst is when they ask, ‘Where are you from?’ Once you answer that question, then it’s ‘What is the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani government?’ ” Raja, who says he is asked that question “almost every day,” has recommended that his passengers see “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Susan Orlean’s swanky retreat. With a slide show!

Happy birthday, Alexander Woolcott. Here’s more about the caricature.