Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely.

The Class War Has Begun by Frank Rich is excellent and my favorite of this issue. I feel about Occupy Wall Street and the protesters about the same way that Sam Graham-Felsen in Noreen Malone's "The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright" feels: "Even just the physical style, the types of chants, the stuff that they're eating, the granola--it's just so derivative of the sixties," he said. "It's like, 'Guys, let's do something that's more our generation.'" I'm just annoyed with them, frankly. I get it. But I think they're going about it the wrong way. But anyway. It was really refreshing to read this article by Frank Rich that evaluated the movement by using historical context and a different perspective.

Excerpt "Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won't even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression--the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II--are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until--when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism's failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent's. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better." 

The annotations are also excellent! And as an intern, I helped! I retrieved the first, congressional testimony, "Don't Forget Me for a Job," from the Center for Legislative Archives. Was told that editor in chief Adam Moss was so moved by the testimony he cried. I transcribed part of the second, "The Coffee Summit," as well as met Eliot Spitzer and got him the coffee when he came to the office to do the interview (ha, bizarre, but true). 

"The Romney Economy" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells is also a good read, as is Logan Hill's profile of Anton Yelchin (I helped transcribe most of this interview and I hated Anton Yelchin by the end of it, haha. Thought Logan did a good job of illustrating Anton's essence in so few words without imposing any of his own opinions and letting the readers interpret for themselves. To Anton's credit, I've heard Like Crazy was amazing).

If the answer matters, you've got your answer.

Another excerpt from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In honor of Veterans Day? I don't know.

"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer. For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen--and maybe it did, anything's possible--even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead. That's a true story that never happened." (p. 80).

Managing our decline.

"The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright," in the October 24 issue of New York Magazine aimed to analyze the current post-recession "post-hope" generation. I really wanted to love it. I had the biggest issue with her sources. Noreen Malone placed too much of herself, her experiences, her sister, her friends and acquaintances, in an article that was supposed to describe a group comprised of an entire generation, people from all walks of life. She seemed to know most of the sources beforehand (with the exception of Yaphet Murphy, an Occupy Wall Street protester later eliminated from the article for lying about his age, and thus, not fitting into the demographic). They all looked the same: white, Brooklyn residents (We all know which parts right? One, she described, had a "Brooklyn beard." What does that even mean?), members of middle class (or higher) families, who followed their dreams (woodworking or English, for example) and are now either stuck and hating it or stuck and loving it. No interviews with minorities, community college students, few with residents of the outer boroughs. No interviews with people of the generation who have perhaps beaten odds (low-income families) but found success through perseverance and hard work (they're out there).

I think she wrestles a lot with her point. I think she feels the way the title implies, that we're sort of alright, but is told otherwise by her research, sources, society. She ends by explaining a term she's often heard of: managed decline. "That's what we're doing when we decide that we can be okay with having more unpredictable careers and more modest lifestyles, if that's what's in store: Even as we hold out hope that something will reverse the trajectory, we are managing our decline, we are making do."

I agree. But between the awful transitions, beers with her Brooklyn sources/friends, analyses of songs from indie artists I'm sure most of our generation has not heard of, and one awful lamp metaphor, she did not support her conclusion.

###

It seems like most of the commenters for this story agreed.

More from this issue:

1. After the Rapture by Dan P. Lee -- Kind of amazing to me that Harold Camping was able to convince thousands that the world would end, first on May 21, and then on October 21. Dan P. Lee describes when Camping had a stroke: "As Camping was eating, God entered his body--for it would have to have been this way, there was no other possibility--coalescing several cells into a tiny clot of lipids that traveled through his bloodstream by the beating of his heart to a narrow bend in a tiny vessel in his brain. As Shirley stood by him in the dining room, the ambulance en route, inside his skull, God began suffocating Camping's brain cells." So good.

2. "I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I was Now Afraid Not to Die." by Boris Kachka -- First, kind of weird that the title is a quote from the article. Second, I confess. I had no idea who Joan Didion is... still really don't, as I didn't read the whole article. But I loved the lede: "Reading Joan Didion on any subject is like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks. You look down and pray the ice will hold. Meeting her is not a vastly different experience. Opening the door to her cavernous Upper East Side apartment, the writer murmurs a monotone "hello" but doesn't shake hands. There's bottled water, she says, waving in the direction of a double-size Sub-Zero in her double-size kitchen. She wears a sun-faded white sleeveless skirt-suit fashioned from the raw silk curtains in her old house in Brentwood. She is 76 but looks older. She has always been birdlike, five two and wire-thin, but never quite this frail. Her arms are translucent river systems of veins. Her face is worn, unyielding. "She doesn't express it," says her agent and friend Lynn Nesbit, but you can see the pain in her face.""

3. How to Survive a Zombie Attack by Dan Kois -- I was both amused by and extremely impressed with this five-page spread. Might be my favorite part of the issue. I would have probably argued that five pages is too many to devote to zombies, but it really works. It called on the expertise of a wide range of people, including Stephen King, professors, neuroscientists, producers and museum curators, to give useful advice for hypothetical (impossible?) situations. It was extremely well-done, educational, and fun to read.

All cities can be endlessly improved by a heterodox profusion of creativity.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I fell asleep. Life is exhausting and mustering up the energy to blog regularly (even seemingly simple posts) has been difficult. But it's not that I haven't been reading. I'm currently an intern at New York Magazine and aside from keeping up with current events and blogs (most of which I'm linked to via Twitter), I've been reading each week's issue. It occurred to me Saturday that, duh, I should blog about what I've read in the magazine. Every issue has such great content, I fall more in love with the magazine each week. The most recent issue, aside from the one that hit stands today, is the Urban Global Design issue (10/17/11). It's the first major issue I've assisted with since my internship started a little more than a month ago; it took me a few days to open it up and want to read it for reasons that I may eventually explain here, but once I did, I couldn't deny that the issue was impressive. It was nice to see how wonderfully it all came together in the end. And it was so exciting to work on! Urban design, cities, and how urban design shapes and defines those cities is a topic I've long been interested in.

My favorites from this issue:

1. Bailout Ball by Will Leitch -- I don't really follow the NBA but the lockout sucks for the fans, and probably even more so for the players. Leitch highlights their powerlessness.

2. They See Rich People by Diana Spechler -- A quirky perspective. I really enjoyed this piece.

^^ Intelligencer section content: always honest, to the point, informative, perceptive, often funny.

3. Design: City As Lab by Wendy Goodman (design editor) and Justin Davidson -- An introduction to the cover package. All cities are different and all cities can be endlessly improved by a heterodox profusion of creativity. 


4. The Delirious City: A Survey, reporting by Jillian Goodman, Andre Tartar, and Kat Ward -- Love this compilation created by surveying the world's most prominent architects, critics, urban planners, etc. Think my favorite is the Wikileaks' data center, for sure. Second favorite, the kindergarten classroom in a tree.

5. Design Hunting: Global Edition by Wendy Goodman, some reporting by Rachel Baker* -- I'm attached to this section because I spent the last month and a half or so helping with it. My favorites are the cement plant in Barcelona, the Rotterdam Market Hall, and the Warsaw installation.

*I saw this post received a view and as I reread it, I realized now is a good time to edit this slightly. I'm editing this 3+ years later (11/8/14) to say that I  conducted the interview and wrote the post for the Warsaw installation blurb. I didn't want to mention it then because I was still an intern. But I remember being really upset at the time that I wrote it and that it was attributed to one of the editors. I've also since realized that this is often the way it goes when you're at the bottom. And one day it won't be as such.

6. Tune In, by editors -- Love this. Love the reflections; four music videos that changed pop culture! Videos by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Duran Duran, and Nirvana.

7. Back In The Day-O by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Interview with Harry Belafonte. Loved the bit about the role models not living in the neighborhoods anymore. And how ironic that Barack Obama's father was one of the students sponsored by Belafonte to come to America!

I'll try to post some links from the previous issues soon. And I'm excited to post about this week's issue, whose cover story is about my "post-hope" generation, and how maybe we're not so hopeless, after all.

The thermodynamic miracle.

Watchmen. I can't remember the last time I read a book so engrossing. I love it. I missed that. I missed reading!

I found the following excerpt on Tumblr a few months ago and reblogged it because I loved it so much, completely unaware of the fact that it came from Watchmen. Jon brings Laurie to Mars, where he has escaped to. She tries to convince him to return to Earth, as it is chaotic and destructive with his absence, but he doesn't believe it's worth it. He believes life is meaningless, that she's meaningless. They fight. She cries. He realizes he's wrong. He says:

"Thermodynamic miracles ... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that precise daughter ... until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold ... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle. But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget ... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away."

Chapter IX, p. 26

I should have become a watchmaker.

I love Watchmen. I've been reading it slowly -- usually just during subway rides. Today I read chapter 4 and, so far, it's my favorite.

I tend to be attracted to stories about the misunderstood "monster." And then of course there's science fiction: the supernatural, the manipulation of space and time. Finally, the essentials: love & loss, nostalgia & torment. You know, all the stuff that makes for good literature.

I found the chapter on YouTube. I think it's better to read it; the suspense builds more dramatically as your eyes move from scene to scene and your mind processes what is happening. But still, seriously amazing.

Watchmen Motion Comic, Part 1/3


Watchmen Motion Comic, Part 2/3


Watchmen Motion Comic, Part 3/3



"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
- Albert Einstein

Top 100 Science-Fiction & Fantasy

About a week ago, NPR published a list of the top 100 science-fiction and fantasy books, as chosen by their readers. I love, love, love science-fiction and fantasy, and some of my favorite books of all time made the list (1984, Animal Farm, Frankenstein!, Flowers for Algernon). It's my goal to read them all.

Right now I'm reading Watchmen. I really like it so far.