Amy Goodman just talked to the endlessly brave Seymour Hersh, and it’s powerful stuff. From the transcript of the live interview:

About what’s going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what’s been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed—I don’t know whether he thinks he’s doing God’s will or what his father didn’t do, or whether it’s some mandate from—you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He’s going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he’s inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that’s what we’re going to have.
…

There were people—serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that’s what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That’s what’s happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I’m writing about all of this soon, so I don’t want to overdo it, but there’s been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.
…

We have a President that—and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper—when a reporter or journalist asked—actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we’re going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn’t involved in the process. Words mean nothing—nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don’t do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib.

Seymour Hersh: “We’ve Been Taken Over by a Cult”
[Democracy Now! transcript]
Annals of National Security: Torture at Abu Ghraib [New Yorker, 5.10.04]

Categories: Hersh, NYer, Extracurriculars

If I’m not mistaken, this weekly rant about the New Yorker’s ads hasn’t been updated in ages. Come back, R. Callahan, and show us more of your sufferings! The only ad I’ll defend to the death is “Are you missing a piece of your pattern?” For sheer sadness, that phantom fork is up there with Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes. Never used.”

The New Yorker Inane Ad of the Week

Categories: NYer, Ads

On the F train from Brooklyn, a tall man in calf-length green and purple patterned wool coat, dark grey wool pants with a thin purple stripe, checked shirt, grey tweed cap, well-shined black shoes, and iPod, managing to be natty and flamboyant at once without being obnoxious about it. Reading the Philip Johnson obit, natch.
Incidentally, the Talk of the Town and In the Magazine pages on CondéNet could be better coordinated; not all the links work, and they don’t quite match in either style or description (also, the issue date is wrong on the former). [Note from the future: Needless to say, this is no longer true.]

I’ve been sick, etc., but Tom Scocca was on the Sasha Frere-Jones/R.E.M. watch:

The turn of the 90’s is a tough subject for historians of rock music. What would become identifiable genres or market niches over the next few years—”alternarock,” “indie,” “grunge” et al.—were embryonic and imperfectly differentiated. You could find the Jesus and Mary Chain shelved under “folk rock.” MTV didn’t have a handle on it; Rolling Stone really didn’t have a handle on it. Events that would change music history were being spread by word of mouth, cassette and the Trouser Press Record Guide.

So it’s not surprising that The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones ran into some trouble with his review, in the Jan. 17 issue, of concerts by aging acts from that era. Is it quite right, for instance, to say that R.E.M. “entered the mainstream with the 1991 hit ‘Losing My Religion’”? The edges of the mainstream were a little blurry back then, but The New York Times had covered a sold-out R.E.M. show at Madison Square Garden two years earlier, part of a nationwide arena tour. And the band already had a pair of Top 10 hits, the first in 1987.

Mr. Frere-Jones’ piece raised plenty of other debatable claims: The Pixies, he wrote, “never made a bad record”—well, maybe, but the set list on the band’s reunion tour flinched away from its last two albums. He also condemned the Pixies’ early videos as “almost unwatchable,” which is more or less like saying Public Enemy never wrote a good love song.

But some historical statements are factually checkable: “Now [the Pixies] look like science teachers, and seem more at home in their geeky, aggressively strange songs,” Mr. Frere-Jones reported. “Frank Black is fat, and, from the mezzanine at least, he looked bald.”

“Now”? “From the mezzanine”? Perhaps if the band had made more watchable videos, Mr. Frere-Jones might have gotten a better look at them their first time around. For the benefit of the critic—and The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking desk—Off the Record presents a publicity photo of the youthful Mr. Black (then going by the name Black Francis). He’s the one on the left.

Off the Record [New York Observer 1.24.05, now archived/$]

From Gawker earlier this week, a witty resurrection of a classic Tina-bash from the great days of Spy.

Your first assignment is to buy The Best American Essays 2003 and read Donald Antrim’s “I Bought a Bed,” one of the inspirations for this blog, and an essential one. In fact, I dedicate this blog to Antrim. My admiration for this essay, plus his next recollection (also published in the magazine), is gigantic. Read Katha Pollitt’s “Learning to Drive” in the same collection—it’s very moving and funny, and she’s my friend, so all the more reason if you unthinkably missed it the first time.

Reviews of current issue to come. Copy editors (do you prefer one word or two? I go back and forth)—I’m going to need you. Serial comma or no? Feelings about full sentences in parentheses? Newspaper copy editors who can’t stand one-sentence grafs, or dig them? You’re among friends here.