A response in the British press to David Remnick’s story on the dogged and bedraggled (and now victorious) Tony Blair. From Madeleine Bunting in The Tablet:

The nadir of this kind of political contempt was the interview of the Prime Minister by Little Ant and Dec, two ten-year-old interviewers who feature on ITV’s Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, as described by the New Yorker editor, David Remnick. One could sense the disbelief of the American journalist as he recounted that Blair was asked if he was “mad”, had ever eaten junk food such as Turkey Twizzlers, and worse.

The treatment of Blair—brutal, personal and demeaning—is similar to the way other celebrities are now routinely humiliated. Political strategists, early in the campaign, acknowledged the masochism of Blair as he got down to shirt sleeves, sweating profusely under the hostility. We may be a more tolerant nation in our private lives, but the flipside is the judgementalism and lack of basic charity we lavish on public figures. One of the primary impulses of the country driving the past four weeks has been to make Blair pay—a real desire to wipe the once-ready smile off his face. We have managed to make running for public office look like standing in the village stocks.

If you didn’t click on the link above to Turkey Twizzlers, you really should. Despite their condemnation by “school dinner standards campaigner” Jamie Oliver (who looks disconcertingly like a lost member of Duran Duran), their popularity is rising. I wonder how successful Super Size Me was in the U.K.? One of the most inspiring things in the documentary (aside from its power to make me throw away a full box of Milk Duds), I thought, was the Appleton, Wisc., initiative that calmed down teenagers with healthy food. All America has hardly converted to non-pizza-and-Coke school lunches, but it might be a good idea on both sides of the pond to prevent any more small children from turning into the likes of Little Ant and Dec, who really do look perfect for a Lord of the Flies remake.

‘Choice is part of a new political consensus of Tories and New Labour’ [The Tablet; login]
Blair grilled by Little Ant & Dec [BBC News; featuring photo of the Prime Minister looking as though he’s on the electric chair]
Banned in Scotland but good enough for English children [Guardian; extra-icky photo]
Letter From London: The Modernizer [Julian Barnes on Blair, 1994; New Yorker archives]

3. ON THE RUN

Winter hours, white
dune grass.
Secret
pinewoods to the ocean—now what?

Franz Wright has a point (in this week’s “Four Poems of Youth”), but he needn’t worry. The answer is clearly back-country skiing. As a supplement to Nick Paumgarten’s “Dangerous Game: A ski mountaineer and a history of tragedy” (which isn’t online, sorry), you can read up on the sporty suicide’s dream hobby here on the travel-writing blog Gadling.

By the way, does anyone else find Lawrence Osborne’s “Letter From New Guinea” a little offputting? His tone reminds me of ethnographies that were already musty when I was in college, and the disclaimers about the fetishization of “first contacts” and romanticization of the noble savage—not to mention phony “primitivist spectacles” staged for precisely this kind of thrill-seeking tourist—are key points but feel like an afterthought. Nevertheless, the stories are great, especially about the forests’ various creatures, like a rare lizard (the comely emerald tree monitor) who’s instantly transformed from nature-special material into something quite different:

The youths jumped on the dazed reptile and gaily beat out its brain with sticks. Holding it up by its tail, they showed it off—a huge, three-foot specimen with jewel-like markings—while blood dripped from its tongue. This would be their dinner, it appeared…. The island’s beautiful parrots proved a still more anguishing problem. The porters liked them roasted on spits.

The placement of New Yorker ads often leads to funny juxtapositions, and there are several in this piece alone; Osbourne’s close attention to penis gourds gives a new meaning to “European sophistication. Tropical dress code” (Lago Mar ad, p. 130). And having just gotten over the idea of a breakfast of roasted mouse legs—”so small that we had to eat thirty of them to satisfy our hunger. They had a vile taste, a cross between stale pork and licorice”—the reader may no longer be in the mood for a box of sixteen “signature mice,” handmade in chocolate by L.A. Burdick (p. 135). Not to mention that the new Qantas ads that have been showing up in the magazine and elsewhere lately (p. 125) feature people who come neither from America nor New Guinea, nor Earth. These two should have contributed a Letter From Space.

The Kombai with whom Osbourne and his fellows make contact seem intensely acclimated to the ways of Westerners in one regard: One man in a hornbill penis gourd tells them through a translator, “When we saw you, we thought, What is that?…Then we were mad. Then we were scared.” If that’s not a description of people-watching in New York, I don’t know what is.

In the New Yorker! [Gadling]
Penis Gourd Gallery [Rhymer; you must]

The New York Post on the travel issue:

The New Yorker‘s first-ever travel issue is out—let’s hope it is the last one. We don’t like reading about where the sons and daughters of the fabulously wealthy spend their vacations. Nick Paumgarten skiing on avalanche-prone mountains, for instance. Well, that’s really smart. Then we hear his family has pursued this sport for generations, even though two family members have been killed. Get down off the mountain, Paumgarten, and please take the rest of the crackpots who contributed to this lame concept with you! What a flagrant way to try to con the travel industry out of some ads while insouciant journalists do little reporting.

Well, the word “hazardous” is in the subhed. Can every contributor to the issue be a son or daughter of the fabulously wealthy? Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley, Mary Gordon? As for luxury sports, go up to Sugarbush sometime to watch the stoned snowmakers fly blind down the mountain at night. You don’t have to be a Kennedy or a Bono to do dumb things on skis!

And here’s Slate with a less angry critique:

For this “Journeys” issue, Tad Friend travels to Oman alongside Lonely Planet mogul Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen; along the way, Friend evaluates the guidebooks’ cultural impact (U.S. forces used LP to figure out which sites they shouldn’t bomb in Iraq) and notes, “like Apple and Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s, all of which began as plucky alternatives, Lonely Planet has become a mainstream brand.” … The author of a “Letter from New Guinea” describes going on a guided tour into the rainforest and meeting members of a tribe that hadn’t encountered white tourists before. (Predictably, a naked tribesman asks the tourists, “Shall we wrap your penises?”) … A profile of Brazilian economist-turned-photographer Sebastiao Salgado examines his quest to photograph Antarctica. … And Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley, and others recall memorable family vacations. —B.B. [Bidisha Banerjee]

Remember in the ’90s when all those booksellers and beer companies and clothing stores hid behind made-up “plucky alternatives” to lure in mall-fearing independent types? Now they don’t have to—everyone loves their chains so so much. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me Starbucks coffee tastes good. I mean not with soy milk, not with foam, not with sugar, not with caramel, not with mint, not with bourbon, not with ice cream. Just the coffee. No, it doesn’t taste good, does it? So if you live in New York, go to Oren’s already!

Update: From my friend Lisa of the luscious links, the Delocator, which lets you type in your zip code and find all the non-Starbucks caffeine joints near you. Via Stayfree, and just what the coffee doctor ordered.

Bad ‘Reader’-Keeping [NY Post]
What Do Condi, Jon Stewart, and Jay-Z Have in Common? [Slate]
Ski Resort Tycoon [PC Games]
Push Back Starbucks! [Church of Stop Shopping]

Thank goodness for Greg Allen and “This Week in the New Yorker”! He does it, quite quite often, so I don’t have to. Yes, there’s a new issue out soon. You’re telling me you finished 3.28 already? Right, me neither.
Speaking of the current issue, everyone may be talking about John Updike’s rousing non-verse-form Kierkegaard essay, but don’t let that distract you from reading the Spamalot review by the dazzling John Lahr, who has the sublime taste to let Jack Gilbert have the last word. Lahr has so much class he sends Spamalot profile-writers Dave Eggers (also in The New Yorker) and New York magazine’s Bill Zehme to the corner with dunce caps for letting fandom get in the way of reason. You know I’m all for enthusiasm, but there’s no reason to sound like Us Weekly unless you’re writing for Us Weekly. Heartbreaking work, indeed.
This Week in the New Yorker (3.28.05) [Greg.org]
Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” [Poetry Daily]

The cows are to be slaughtered
And the sheep, too, of course.
The same for the hogs sighing in their pens—
And as for the chickens…

“On the Farm,” the typically worried Charles Simic poem in the magazine this week, seems especially ominous in light of last week’s terrifying bird-flu story by Michael Specter, which is one of those pieces you read and immediately, gratefully, forget. Or else it comes back to you in uneasy pieces, clucking “Do something!” But what? Ben Greenman wonders the same thing:

[BG:] What can be done to stop the next big pandemic from starting?
[MS:] Nothing. At least, nothing can be done to prevent a virus from taking on new characteristics. But by closely monitoring the spread, and by examining the genetic structure of the virus, we can get a sense of how to develop a vaccine and how to make better drugs. Then we would need to actually spend money to make the vaccines and the drugs, and this is something the world puts little priority on. There are many competing health problems in most countries. So it is difficult to tell a political leader or a pharmaceutical company that makes vaccines that they should invest hundreds of millions of dollars on something that may happen, when there are so many other problems that already exist.

Greenman also asks “What does it take for a virus to cross the species barrier?” which bears a funny if probably unintended resemblance to another common question about poultry motivation.

Fighting the Flu [Michael Specter interview, New Yorker]
Watching for the Next Pandemic [On Point; radio inteview with Specter, Laurie Garrett, etc.]
Talking to the Little Birdies [Simic, American Poems]

Like many people, I tend to suspect the prolific, mostly because I tend to not be. But almost everything Ben McGrath writes for Talk of the Town is like a Mrs. Prindable apple: juicy, sweet, modestly extravagant, and just tart and nutty enough to satisfy. His TOT (if anyone knows the in-house abbreviation, please send–it might just be “Talk”) this week about rebuilding the A/C line is full of sound information just until it isn’t, when it becomes an investigation into the ethereal–my kind of Talk of the Town. Robert Benchley pieces have just this kind of daffy, utterly confident meandering. Seven hundred words or so is a good platform for a serious editorial, sure, and it’s hard not to love terse, sword-point portraits of Cracker Jack prize experts or very small controversies. But this is my favorite: McGrath’s expansiveness within the form, like a hippo blues dancing in a wading pool.

Dept. of Prediction: Three to Five [New Yorker]

Categories: NYer, Issue, McGrath, Benchley