To come in and preside over the rape of so many people with a big smile on your face and an attitude of benevolence and righteousness...it was almost too offensive to comprehend. A lot of these people sincerely believed that their North American birth and their superior dentistry made them the arbiters of public morality by default. Growing up, I ( Read more... )

I've already made my first somewhat-large change to my paper, totally independent of my advisor. I read a fun article this morning about a lovely man named David Addington who has apparently been the muscle behind Dick Cheney on executive privilege and torture and all kinds of neat stuff. (Reading this made me feel really out of the loop...I'd ( Read more... )

New Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi, as pointed out by Talamasca. Contains my new favorite Matt Taibbi quote:

George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have ( Read more... )

I was just reading through an old Rolling Stone magazine from about 10 years ago, and I laughed when I saw record exec Don Ienner referred to as "Donny Inner". Good background research, writer! Good copy-editing skills, editor!

This article on family leave from the New York Times Magazine was written by Eyal Press, who went to my high school and graduated with my sister. Eyal wrote a book a couple of years ago about his father, who was the only abortion provider left in Buffalo after Barnett Slepian was shot and killed. I think he's a very good writer, which pains me to ( Read more... )

The Harry Potter issue of Entertainment Weekly is cracking me up. Apparently whiny fandom wank has made it to the level of major weekly publication. There's a sidebar by a guy named Andrew Keen decrying the carpet book and bitching about how people on the internet are just big fat meanies.

Online spoilers need to be held much more accountable ( Read more... )

In honor of the long-time-coming death of Jane magazine, here's an old article from Bitch about the many loathsome attributes of the Sassy spinoff.

Jane magazine has always made me sad. It made me sad from the very first issue, which I bought because Drew Barrymore was on the cover and I needed something to read on a plane. I had no idea it was ( Read more... )

Oh, Entertainment Weekly. You've got to love a magazine that follows a puff propaganda piece about the Transformers movie with a solemn profile of Joyce Carol Oates and a rapturous tribute to Xanadu. The cognitive dissonance is too much for my brain to take on a Friday night.

Sasha Frere-Jones from the New Yorker needs $5K to retrieve photos off his crashed hard drive. I have a couple of thoughts about this ( Read more... )

You know how I always complain about how reading the internet makes me feel old? Well, I just got junk mail from Time magazine offering me the senior citizen's rate. NOW I feel old.