7 posts tagged “the new yorker”

I don't know if anyone else noticed this article on the casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago.  I had no idea.  I thought it was really freaky.  When the Israelies are concerned that American Jews are getting too cheeky with their leaders, we should probably be concerned too.  Maybe it only interested me so much because I live in Las Vegas.  And because the article references an incident that Adelson had with one of our most famous/popular local columnists.  Anyway, half way through I almost stopped reading it because I felt like it was just so dark.  Then I kept reading because I thought I should go ahead and face the darkness.  Work through it.

It was a similar feeling to how I felt when I read this article about the political gadfly asshole, Roger Stone.  Again, it is totally freaky how dark this guy is and how twisted his existence is.  The man has Richard Nixon's face tattooed on his upper back.  Does that sound like a reasonable person to you?  And the fact that he's all wrapped up with our messed up politicians is very disturbing. 

Who are these men?  Why are they so scary?  Why do they have such power?  Why are they important enough to merit profiles in the New Yorker?

And I just can't bring myself to read Sy Hersch's most recent article about how Bush et al. are gearing up for an invasion of Iran. 

I also came across this today on the Huffington Post and actually had to double and triple take to be sure that it was a joke.  (Even though he did, in fact, make yet another comment about killing Iranians.  Here's the video.)  This guy really scares me too.   He's totally dead behind the eyes.  Very disturbing. 

Fortunately, I also read this article recently by one of my fav medical writers for the New Yorker, Atul Gawande.  This one is about the science of itching.  Fascinating.  (That's me trying to end on a positive note.)

So you might have figured out by now that I tend to read the New Yorker every week.  It's the one thing that comes in the mail that I pretty much read cover to cover.  I also get The Nation, Wondertime, Parenting, and Yoga Journal but I don't read them nearly as thoroughly or with such dedication.

So the latest issue of the New Yorker was the Money Issue.  When it arrived I was like, Oh great, that should be fun.  It's the same way that I generally feel about the Style Issue every year when that happens.  Not too excited.  Turns out that I read pretty much everything in there over the weekend and I think that it was one of the most coherent issues of the magazine that they have put together recently.  The articles really flowed from one to another even though they were very varied and they were totally interesting.  I even liked the story by Jeffrey Eugenides, Great Experiment, and I rarely enjoy the fiction in this magazine. 

I also figured out that I really don't understand anything about money.  This is not really a new thing, but reading all of these financially informed articles kind of slammed it home (or maybe it is really those articles combined with doing our taxes over the past couple of weeks).  For example, there is a whole article in there about the first Black CEO of a Wall Street Firm, Merrill Lynch.  The point of the article is supposed to be a profile of this man and how he rose through the ranks and made all these impressive changes in the company and then how he was vilified when ML lost a bunch of money (and cred I guess) in the current mortgage lending crisis.  Or at least I think that was the point of the article. 

What I kept thinking about however, was not, Wow, this guy is amazing, or Wow, this guy is a jerk, or Wow, anything to do with this guy's success story.  Instead, all I kept thinking was what do these people actually do?  I don't understand buying and selling loans and securities, moving money around, moving debt around, I mean, I just don't get it. 

This is how lost I am: let's say you work for ML...how do you know what to do when you get to the office in the morning?  What do you do all day?  I don't understand what any of those kinds of jobs actually entail.  At all!

And this may be why I liked the Eugenides story.  The main character in the story doesn't get it either.  Of course, he gets involved in an embezzlement scheme, which is way beyond anything I could imagine doing, but still!

I've got a lot to learn.

Where do you get recommendations for new books to read?

Anywhere I can.  Sometimes in bookstores.  Sometimes from reading magazines.  Sometimes for looking for other stuff while I'm at work. 

A couple of weeks ago, the mister sent me a news story about how Americans aren't reading anymore.  Maybe you saw it.  It made me remind myself that I read two books this summer and really liked both of them and that I read the New Yorker almost every week, pretty much cover to cover.  Made myself feel better.

And I've started another one this week, which is not this exact book pictured below but is actually a British version of the following book called, Social Theory, Social Policy, and Aging by Estes, Biggs, and Phillipson.  You get the idea.

Any reading suggestions for the fall?

I don't know if you read my post from a while back about our wasp problem in the back yard.  Anyway, that seems to have died down although I have no explanation for it.  But, in last week's New Yorker, there was a pretty good story about the vanishing honeybee situation in the U.S.  I learned a lot from it. 

Lots to read in that issue.  It also had a good article on internet spam, another on the possible link between the firing of a U.S. district attorney (a la Gonzales) and the murder of one of them, and another on Oakmont Golf Course in PA.  I read it all.  I love it when there's nothing that I want to skip but instead I actually run out of good stuff to read in one issue.  Check it out.

It's during events like this Libby thing that I am particulary thankful that I don't have cable tv and can barely even get the local news using our tv's rabbit ears.  And I'm not very good at being addicted to news on the internet so I've been avoiding that as well.  I mainly get my news from NPR and that's fine with me.  I know what's been going on with the case and the ensuing non-pardon, pardon nonsense.  I'm just glad that I've managed to miss the pundits. 

The mister was watching some Hardball clip on his computer this afternoon.  It was some bullshit interview with some conservative old white man who was going on and on about Clinton and his perjury.  Whatever.  Just hearing a little bit of it made me really happy that I'm not addicted to news tv or the like.

Last week my friend Jonell posted a link on her blog to a video commentary by Keith Olbermann.  Again, I don't have cable but friends have sent me links to his comments before and so I knew what I was getting in to.  Maybe you've already seen it.  Anyway, I don't know if it's just my moon or what, but I could barely watch the first four minutes of it.  I just felt so sad and demoralized by it all.  I had to turn it off.  It was making me cry.  In the past when I've watched his comments I've felt inspired and angered but glad to see someone saying what so many of us think and feel.  This time I just felt overwhelmed by the negativity and seeming futility of it all.  Like he can keep doing scathing video commentary and it will have no cumulative effect at all.  Those guys do whatever the hell they want to do (just as they have been all along) and nothing seems to be able to stop them.  And of course I watched this on the 4th.  I wasn't feeling very partiotic before I tried to watch it, and I felt even less after. 

What has been bothering me even more lately was that whole slew of insane Supreme Court decisions.  That's been making me evern more nuts than this most recent display of cronyism.  Still, I think that maybe the mashup between the Supreme Court and Libby just was too much for me.  I just really think that we need to move to Spain.

On a related note, this week in the New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg has a great commentary on Cheney in The Talk of the Town section of the magazine.  Hertzberg hasn't been writing his usual pieces for a while now and I've missed him.  It was good to read him this morning.  My only complaint is that he never makes me feel better about anything, just worse.  Seems to be the way of the world at the moment.

From the current issue of the New Yorker...

The New Yorker has a great article this week about Edith Piaf.  Unfortunately, the text isn't online (I hate that).  There's a new movie out about her.  I haven't seen it.  Anyway, reading that piece gave me some motivation to read more about her life.  I love her music but know basically nothing about her.  A long time ago I read a biography of Judy Garland (tragic) and in there was a foto of Judy and Edith together.  I thought that was cool.  I had no idea about how much tragedy they apparently had in common.  Yikes.