Category: POLITICS

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Bin Laden’s worries revealed … William Shatner narrates NASA’s new shuttle documentary … Secrets from the Battle of Stalingrad … ‘Octomom’ hates her kids and her life … The fascinating and bloody Haitian Revolution.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism. Read past recommendations from this series here.

1. Bin Laden document trove reveals strain on al-Qaeda
By Greg Miller | The Washington Post | July 1
“Toward the end of his decade in hiding, Osama bin Laden was spending as much time exchanging messages about al-Qaeda’s struggles as he was plotting ways for the terrorist network to reassert its strength.”

2. What Is Distant Reading?
By Kathryn Schulz | The New York Times Book Review | June 24
“What are we mortal beings supposed to do with all these books? Franco Moretti has a solution: don’t read them.”

3. Space Shuttle Documentary
NASA | July 1
“This feature-length documentary looks at the history of the most complex machine ever built. For 30 years, NASA’s space shuttle carried humans to and from space, launched amazing observatories, and eventually constructed the next stop on the road to space exploration.”

4. Deadliest Battle
Secrets of the Dead :: PBS | May 20, 2010
“Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the largest troop offensive in military history. And the Battle of Stalingrad is arguably the deadliest single battle the world has ever seen. … But 70 years after the battle was fought, newly uncovered documents, survivor accounts, and stunning archival footage are revealing a very different picture of what took place.”

5. NASA’s Spitzer Finds Distant Galaxies Grazed on Gas
Jet Propulsion Laboratory | June 30
“Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.”

6. Read Bruce Springsteen’s Clarence Clemons Eulogy
By Andrea Kszystyniak | Paste Magazine | June 30
“Standing next to Clarence was like standing next to the baddest ass on the planet. You were proud, you were strong, you were excited and laughing with what might happen, with what together, you might be able to do.”

7. Inside a Russian Billionaire’s $300 Million Yacht
By Robert Frank | The Wall Street Journal | April 15, 2010
“Designed by Philippe Starck, the “A” has quickly become the most loved and loathed ship on the sea. WSJ’s Robert Frank takes an exclusive tour of Andrey Melnichenko’s 394-foot mega-yacht.”

8. Nadya Suleman: Babies disgust me
The Marquee Blog :: CNN.com | June 30
“Suleman, who was labeled with the moniker ‘Octomom’ after she gave birth to octuplets in 2009, told [In Touch magazine], ‘I hate babies, they disgust me.’ She went on, ‘My older six are animals, getting more and more out of control, because I have no time to properly discipline them.’ ”

9. Resolving Insurgencies
By Thomas R. Mockaitis | Strategic Studies Institute | June 17
“Understanding how insurgencies may be brought to a successful conclusion is vital to military strategists and policymakers. This study examines how past insurgencies have ended and how current ones may be resolved.”

10. The Haitian Revolution
By Jeb Sharp | How We Got Here :: PRI’s The World | Jan. 29, 2010
“You can’t understand Haiti without understanding the slave revolt and war for independence that shaped its early days.”

TUNES

Tonight I’m spending some time with the blues, specifically with the Texas Blues Café. Check out the line-up and then listen here.

1. Dennis McClung Blues Band — The Red Rooster
2. Brian Burns with Ray Wylie Hubbard — Little Angel Comes A-Walkin
3. Ray Wylie Hubbard — Cooler-N-Hell
4. Roy Rogers — Little Queen Bee
5. Ted Shumate Blues Band — All Night Long
6. Cactus — The Groover
7. Ian Moore — Muddy Jesus
8. Commitments — Mustang Sally
9. Rocky Jackson — Goin’ Back to Texas
10. Mark McKinney — Comfortable in this Skin & Bonfire
11. Mojo Saints — Gnawin’ Bone
12. Blackfoot — I’ve Got a Line On You

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

The fall of MySpace … Women in special operations … ‘Spy girls’ find each other in retirement … The aircraft carrier may be irrelevant … A boring Gorbachev.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. Twilight of the $UPERfluous Carrier
By Henry J. Hendrix and J. Noel Williams | Proceedings | May 2011
“[T]he march of technology is bringing the supercarrier era to an end, just as the new long-range strike capabilities of carrier aviation brought on the demise of the battleship era in the 1940s.”

2. The Long, Lame Afterlife of Mikhail Gorbachev
By Anne Applebaum | Foreign Policy | July/August 2011
“A cautionary tale about what happens when you fail to see the revolution coming.”

3. The FP Twitterati 100
Foreign Policy | June 20
“Here are 100 Twitter users from around the world who will make you smarter, infuriate you, and delight you — 140 characters at a time.”

4. Heavy sentences
By Joseph Epstein | The New Criterion | June 2011
“Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader.”

5. Decades after duty in the OSS and CIA, ‘spy girls’ find each other in retirement
By Ian Shapira | The Washington Post | June 26
“Doris Bohrer and Elizabeth ‘Betty’ McIntosh met two years ago in a Prince William County retirement community. As their friendship developed, they realized they had both served as intelligence operatives during World War II.”

6. Female Special Operators Now in Combat
By Christian Lowe | Military.com | June 29
“Army Special Operations Command has deployed its first teams of female soldiers assigned to commando units in Afghanistan, and military officials are assessing their initial performance in theater as ‘off the charts.’ ”

7. Beauty and the Beasts: The Sight of a Pretty Woman Can Make Men Crave War
By Rebecca Coffey | Scientific American | June 25
“Show a man a picture of an attractive woman, and he might play riskier blackjack. With a real-life pretty woman watching, he might cross traffic against a red light. Such exhibitions of agility and bravado are the behavioral equivalent in humans of physical attributes such as antlers and horns in animals. ‘Mate with me,’ they signal to women. ‘I can brave danger to defend you and the children.’ ”

8. An A-Z of incredible uses for everyday things
The Guardian | May 7, 2007
“Did you know you can kill weeds with vodka? Remove stains on clothes with aspirin? Make jewellery gleam with tomato ketchup? Here are 40 surprising tips to save you time and money.”

9. Libya mission brings John McCain and John Kerry together again
By Paul Kane | The Washington Post | June 28
“Concerned about what they consider an isolationist and fearful drift in both of their parties, Kerry (D-Mass.) and McCain (R-Ariz.) are advocating an even more forceful role for America in the world.”

10. The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace
By Feliz Gillette | Bloomberg Businessweek | June 22
“It once promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture. Rupert Murdoch fell in love with it. Then everything fell apart.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Ten facts about Jon Huntsman … Hadrian’s villa was more than a villa … Reeling in a 260-pound Mekong giant catfish … A lost Amazon civilization … Sexy corruption in China.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. Our Lefty Military
By Nicholas D. Kristof | The New York Times | June 15
“The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gap …”

2. Fulfilling My Dream of Becoming a Diplomat
By Shamim Kazemi | DipNote | June 16
“It allowed me, in my own way, to give back to the country that offered asylum and a new, safe home to my family. It also fulfilled the desire to serve a common humanity that my upbringing had afforded me to appreciate.”

3. Solomon P. Ortiz congressional papers provide trail through 30 years of South Texas history
By Rick Spruill | Corpus Christi Caller-Times | June 16
“The photographs, congressional correspondence, research papers, meeting minutes and other governmental documents span Ortiz’s congressional career, said Thomas Kreneck, the associate director for Special Collections & Archives at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.”

4. Art of lost Amazon culture a surprise
Archaeology News Network | June 2011
“It is one of the most enticing archaeological mysteries of the Americas — a long-overlooked ancient culture that existed for 900 years on an island at the mouth of Amazon River and then disappeared.”

5. Giant catfish caught in Thailand sets new record
By Emily Sohn | Discovery News | June 16
Welshman David Kent caught “a 260-pound Mekong giant catfish … in Thailand. The angler had baited his hook with a mere piece of sweet corn. It took him just under an hour to reel it in.”

6. A Wider View of Authorship: Eroticizing the Past
By Kenny McPhee | The Bombshell :: Bookslut | June 2011
“Early in Eavan Boland’s dazzling new book, ‘A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet,’ she tells a story: when she was a young poet and mother living in the suburbs of Dublin, she went into the city one day and happened to walk by an art gallery where she spied in the window a painting she immediately recognized as her mother’s work — her green vase, her beloved lily-of-the-valley, her pair of gloves.”

7. Election 101: Ten facts about Jon Huntsman and his presidential campaign
By Husna Haq | The Christian Science Monitor | June 21
“Dubbed ‘the Republican Democrats fear most,’ the tall, handsome, cerebral former governor of Utah often draws comparisons to Mr. Obama, the very man he’s struggling to distance himself from. Will that, and his centrist views and Mormon faith, keep him on the margins of the Republican field?”

8. True Stories: They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To
By Molly Jong-Fast | Nerve | June 14
“A writer comes to terms with the sexual adventures of her parents.”

9. Sex, Buddhism and ballroom dancing: WikiLeaks reveals Beijing underbelly
By Michael Sheridan | The Australian | June 20
“US diplomats used to collect racy gossip linking Chinese leaders with mistresses and corruption, according to leaked cables reporting their conversations with political insiders and journalists.”

10. Hadrian’s buildings catch the Sun
By Eric Hand | NatureNews | June 16
“Hadrian’s villa 30 kilometres east of Rome was a place where the Roman Emperor could relax in marble baths and forget about the burdens of power. But he could never completely lose track of time, says Marina De Franceschini, an Italian archaeologist who believes that some of the villa’s buildings are aligned so as to produce sunlight effects for the seasons.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Look back at the fall of the Soviet Union … Celebrating Clarence Clemons … The fight over the world’s longest river … Che’s diary published … Iraq’s unseen war.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War
By Noah Shachtman | Danger Room :: Wired | June 14
“In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment -– a radio-frequency jammer –- was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.”

2. My First Time, Twice
By Ariel Levy | Guernica | June 2011
“After Josh broke my heart, my great regret was not that I had lost my virginity to him, but that I hadn’t. If I was going to be lovelorn, at least I would have liked the consolation of being able to brag that I’d had sex.”

3. New ‘Che’ Guevara diary of the revolution published in Cuba
GlobalPost | June 14
“‘Diary of a Combatant’ documents the three-year guerrilla campaign that resulted in the overthrow of Batista and Castro taking power.”

4. Gulf ‘Dead Zone’ This Year Predicted To Be Largest In History
By Cain Burdeau | HuffPost Green | June 14
“Each year when the nutrient-rich freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers pours into the Gulf, it spawns massive algae blooms. In turn, the algae consume the oxygen in the Gulf, creating the low oxygen conditions. Fish, shrimp and many other species must escape the dead zone or face dying.”

5. Struggle Over the Nile: A special report
Al Jazeera | June 2011
“It is the world’s longest river. A 7,000-km lifeline for almost 400 million people. It runs through 11 countries, including South Sudan, from the highlands in the heart of Africa to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a source of sustenance, but also of tension — and even potential conflict.”

6. Cold Specks | Holland
By David D. Robbins Jr. | Their Bated Breath | June 13
“This London by way of Toronto singer-songwriter has a voice that is unmistakable. So unmistakable, that as soon as I heard this new track, “Holland”, I knew right away who the singer was. She has a voice that knocks you in the gut, and you’ll never forget it.”

7. If chivalry is dead, blame it on the selfish feminists
By Lucy Jones | The Telegraph | June 15
“Thankfully, there are still men out there who will take your coat, pull out the chair and pay for dinner”

8. Remembering Clarence Clemons
Rolling Stone | June 18
“The legendary E Street Band saxophonist’s life in photos”

9. The Long Breakup
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund | The Washington Post | June 2011
“Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union came to an end. It was a drawn-out and difficult journey, full of passion, hope, anger, betrayal and re-awakening. Between now and the end of the year, The Post will track the major developments, in real time, of the last six months of the U.S.S.R.”

10. Japan Quake Released Hundreds of Years of Strain
By Brett Israel | Our Amazing Planet | June 15
“The March 11 earthquake is the fourth-largest ever recorded in the world. The quake struck off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan, triggering a deadly tsunami that may have killed nearly 30,000 people.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

A bold vision from Joint Chiefs officers … Another look at LBJ … What Voyager 1 has discovered … The new iTunes … 100 facts for Machu Picchu.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. The Power Broker’s Other Voice
By Jason Sokol | Slate | June 13
“President Lyndon Johnson, domineering and manipulative, lives on in American memory as the classic power broker. … Yet this is not the Johnson who emerges from volumes seven and eight of The Presidential Recordings, a transcription of his phone conversations from June 1 to July 4 of 1964.”

2. The Y Article
By John Norris | Foreign Policy | April 13
“The piece was written by two senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a ‘personal’ capacity, but it is clear that it would not have seen the light of day without a measure of official approval. Its findings are revelatory, and they deserve to be read and appreciated not only by every lawmaker in Congress, but by every American citizen.”

3. Voyager 1 Reaches Surprisingly Calm Boundary of Interstellar Space
By Geoff Brumfiel | Nature and Scientific American | June 15
“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is at the limit of the ‘heliosheath’, where particles streaming from the Sun clash with the gases of the galaxy. Contrary to scientists’ expectation of a sharp, violent edge, the boundary seems to be a tepid place, where the solar wind mingles with extrasolar particles.”

4. Everything You Need to Know About the New iTunes
By Sam Grobart | Gadgetwise — The New York Times | June 13
“Last week, at the opening of its annual developers’ conference, Apple announced iCloud — its new online storage and syncing service for music, photos, files and software. Although not all of its features are available immediately, one part — “iTunes in the Cloud Beta” — is, if you’ve updated to iTunes 10.3.1. Here is a primer about what you need to know, right now, about it.”

5. Looking beyond Obama to ‘The Golden Age’
By Paul Rosenberg | Al Jazeera | June 11
“Obama has so far been a disappointment to many of his supporters, but he has awakened a worldwide need for real change.”

6. So Much More Than Plasma and Poison
By Natalie Angier | The New York Times | June 6
“Among nature’s grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry?”

7. 100 facts for 100 years of Machu Picchu: Fact 59
By Catharine Hamm | The Los Angeles Times | June 12
“Hiram Bingham, a Yale professor, came upon the vine-covered ruins on July 24, 1911. Here, then, as we lead up to the century mark, are 100-plus facts about Machu Picchu, its country, its history and its players. We’ve been posting one each of the 100 days leading to the anniversary. Read from the bottom up.”

8. Why you’re wrong about who’s going to be elected president next year
By Tom Casciato | Need to Know | June 10
“It’s 2011, do you know who’s going to win the presidential election next year? The answer is no, you don’t. Even if you predict now that someone will win then, and that person ends up winning, it won’t be because you knew. You don’t know.”

9. The Balance of Melville
By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out | June 14
“His masterpiece, ‘Le Samouraï’ (1967), the story of a lone contract killer named Jef Costello, played by exquisitely by Alain Delon, seems to work in perfectly balanced pairs.”

10. How NASA Prepares for the Final Space Shuttle Launch
By Denise Chow | Space.com | June 14
“With just one more mission remaining before the end of NASA’s storied 30-year space shuttle, the agency has shifted its focus to the final launch of Atlantis on July 8. But exactly how does NASA get a space shuttle ready to fly?”

TUNES

Tonight I’m spending some time with the blues, specifically with the Texas Blues Café. Check out the line-up and then listen here.

1. The Insomniacs — Hoodoo Man
2. Carolyn Wonderland — Ain’t Nobody’s Business
3. Los Super Seven — Heard It On the X
4. Robbie King Band — Classic Case of the Blues
5. Jack County — Lonesome Radio
6. BB Chung King and the Budda Heads — Still the Rain
7. The Fabulous Thunderbirds — Painted On
8. Red Rooster Club — Fool for Your Stockings
9. Red Rooster Club — Lie to Me
10. Paul Rogers — Muddy Water Blues
11. Preachers Stone — Mother to Bed

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

History’s biggest volcanic explosions … Great gadgets for Father’s Day … Video of an asteroid … Revisiting McNamara’s War … Regrets of dying men and women.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. Regrets of the Dying
By Bronnie Ware | Inspiration and Chai
“For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. … When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five. …”

2. Arab revolutions mask economic status quo
By Mark LeVine | Al Jazeera | June 10
“Despite talk of a ‘new social contract’, financial powers seek to maintain their grip on the poor of the Middle East.”

3. Our Troops Abroad: What Does a Soldier Need to Read?
By Elizabeth D. Samet | The New Republic | June 11
“Few of us have been castaways, but we’ve all spun variations on the exercise of figuring out whatever is essential to the life of our minds.”

4. McNamara’s Non-War
By James Burnham | National Review | Sept. 19, 1967
“In the form of a statement, August 25, to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense McNamara offered the most elaborate apologia yet made by the Johnson Administration for, specifically, “our conduct of the air war in Vietnam,” and, by implication, for the Vietnam policy in general. … Before trying to pass judgment on his conclusions, it is advisable to make sure we understand what he is saying.”

5. NASA Spacecraft Captures Video of Asteroid Approach
Jet Propulsion Laboratory | June 13
“Scientists working with NASA’s Dawn spacecraft have created a new video showing the giant asteroid Vesta as the spacecraft approaches this unexplored world in the main asteroid belt.”

6. After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World
By John Noble Wilford | The New York Times | June 6
“Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.”

7. Just back: the painted houses of Peru
By Jonathan Carr | The Telegraph | June 10
“Lurid red and orange paint had been daubed everywhere. Villagers throughout Cajamarca region, like everyone else in Peru, were facing a choice between two alleged evils. … To help in the decision-making process, the villagers’ shacks had been marked with giant crosses. But there were no pleas for God to show mercy. This was not that kind of plague. Rather, the names of politicians had been invoked: left-wing Ollanta in red, right-wing Keiko in orange. Soon, the people were to decide which of the two would become president. ”

8. Chekhov on Judgment
By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out | June 10
“Dover Koshashvili’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short novella “The Duel”, a period drama about the residents of a seaside town in the Caucuses, correctly finds the tone set by the original. Take it from a Chekhov lover, the best thing about the Russian’s writing is his ability to arrive at a point of discovery without necessarily providing an apotheosis.”

9. The 10 Biggest Volcanic Eruptions in History
Our Amazing Planet | June 10
“June 15, 2011, marks the 20th anniversary of Mt. Pinatubo’s cataclysmic eruption. … On this anniversary, we countdown the largest volcanic eruptions in history as measured by the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), a classification system somewhat akin to the magnitude scale for earthquakes.”

10. 15 Fantastic Gadgets for Father’s Day
By Doug Aamoth and Chris Gayomali | Time | June 13
“Whether dad loves to grill, fish or take on projects around the house, any number of these geeky goodies are sure to be a hit.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Lessons from a Turkish grandmother … the Churchill we thought we knew … the release of all Pentagon Papers … Anna Nicole Smith and her doomed life … what not to say to the editor that fired you …

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. My ‘Confession’
By Fang Lizhi | The New York Review of Books | June 2011
“From reading Henry Kissinger’s new book On China,1 I have learned that Mr. Kissinger met with Deng Xiaoping at least eleven times—more than with any other Chinese leader—and that the topic of one of their chats was whether Fang Lizhi would confess and repent.”

2. Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new
By Jessi Arrington | TED Talks | June 2011
“Designer Jessi Arrington packed nothing for TED but 7 pairs of undies, buying the rest of her clothes in thrift stores around LA. It’s a meditation on conscious consumption — wrapped in a rainbow of color and creativity.”

3. Chile’s Puyehue Volcano: A slideshow
Time | June 6
“After laying dormant for nearly half a century, the Puyehue volcano in southern Chile erupted on Saturday, shooting a column of ash and gas six miles into the sky and prompting the evacuation of more than 3,500 residents. … Here’s some of the best images photographers captured in the past 24 hours.”

4. “I Would Have Loved To Piss on Your Shoes”
By Jack Shafer | Slate | June 6
“In honor of every journalist who flipped the boss off on the way out the door, I’ve collected a few of their best kiss-off notes and gestures from the recent past. If, after reading, you don’t turn in your badge and burn every bridge and causeway behind you and fill with sewage every tunnel and viaduct that connects you to your former place of employment, I’ve failed in my mission.”

5. After 40 Years, the Complete Pentagon Papers
By Michael Cooper and Sam Roberts | The New York Times | June 7
“It may be a first in the annals of government secrecy: Declassifying documents to mark the anniversary of their leak to the press. But that is what will happen Monday, when the federal government plans to finally release the secret government study of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers 40 years after it was first published by The New York Times.”

6. Paw Paw & Lady Love
By Dan. P. Lee | New York Magazine | June 5
“Has the Supreme Court ever heard such a peculiarly American story as that of Anna Nicole Smith? And they didn’t know the half of it.”

7. Film directors are embracing TV
By Nicole Sperling and Melissa Maerz | Los Angeles Times | June 5
“Let the major movie studios have their superheroes and pirates. Cable TV has become more innovative, and top moviemakers such as Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann and Gus Van Sant are taking advantage.”

8. The Forgotten Churchill
By George Watson | The American Scholar | June 6
“The man who stared down Hitler also helped create the modern welfare state.”

9. Marriage Lessons from My Turkish Grandmother
By Sevil Delin | Granta | June 7
“The stories my grandmother, my anneanne, told me when I was a child are anything but children’s stories. They are folktales that have a common theme – the triumph of wily wives over evil husbands (jealous, repressive skinflints) through crafty subterfuge.”

10. Clever Girl
By Tessa Hadley | The New Yorker: Fiction | June 6
“My stepfather wasn’t a big man, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety dark brows, a sensual mouth, and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I ever touched it, though sometimes, out of curiosity, I wanted to).”

TUNES

My soundtrack for today included:
1. MANDINGA (Live) Buena Vista Social Club
2. A LA LOMA DE BELEN El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico
3. LA NOCHE DE LA IGUANA Lucrecia
4. DOS GARDENIAS Ibrahim Ferrer
5. PATRIA QUERIDA Los Guaracheros De Oriente
6. SON FO Africando All Stars
7. LA LIBELULA Mariana Montalvo
8. GUAJIRA LINDA Celina Gonzalez
9. BOOM BOOM BOOM The Iguanas
10. LA ULTIMA COPA Felipe Rodriguez

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Recommended reading / viewing / listening, Part 1: China’s naval power … ‘Weinergate’ cartoons … the perfect Father’s Day present …Peru’s new president … what disasters can teach us.

Most of these great items come from my Twitter feed or Facebook news feed. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook for more fascinating videos, articles, essays and criticism.

1. Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal
By Junot Diaz | Boston Review | May/June 2011
“Apocalyptic catastrophes don’t just raze cities and drown coastlines; these events, in David Brooks’s words, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” And, equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe, whether we are talking about Haiti or Japan. ”

2. Damon Horowitz calls for a ‘moral operating system’
By Damon Horowitz | TED Talks | May 2011
“At TEDxSiliconValley, Damon Horowitz reviews the enormous new powers that technology gives us: to know more — and more about each other — than ever before. … Where’s the moral operating system that allows us to make sense of it?”

3. Book review: ‘State of Wonder’
By Carolyn Kellogg | Los Angeles Times | June 5
“In her new novel, Ann Patchett’s gives readers almost a feminized version of ‘Heart of Darkness,’ but without the savagery.”

4. What kind of leftist president for Peru?
By Frank Bajak | Associated Press | June 6
“In his first, failed run to be Peru’s president, Ollanta Humala projected the image of a radical leftist in Hugo Chavez’s mold. This time, he called the Venezuelan leader’s socialist-oriented economic model flawed, and sought moderate allies and courted Washington. Yet many Peruvians wonder if this 48-year-old political novice … is really a market-friendly populist. Many skeptics fear he will renege on his promises and spring revolutionary change on an unsuspecting nation.”

5. The Only Father’s Day Gift You Need: A Letter of Appreciation
By Andrew Snavely | Primer | June 6
“Man to man, especially with a dad can be impossible. Some fathers are gruff and won’t tolerate the awkwardness or the sentiment. Others put up walls to shield their emotions from others. These guys are from a different generation. A letter allows you to say everything you need to, just the way you want to.”

6. Death and Drugs in Colombia
By Daniel Wilkinson | The New York Review of Books | June 2011
“In February 2003, the mayor of a small town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast stood up at a nationally televised meeting with then President Álvaro Uribe and announced his own murder.”

7. Stargazer: A story
By Eliot Treichel | Narrative | June 6
“As the pickup truck approached, Walters raised his free hand and motioned for the vehicle to stop. In his other hand he clutched the stock of a lever-action Winchester, the gun barrel angled over his shoulder.”

8. Why China’s Growing Naval Presence Is To Be Expected
By Wesley Clark | Big Think | June 6
“We don’t know exactly what the aim of the Chinese shipbuilding program is, but they are building a Navy. And they do have commerce and it’s a very natural thing.”

9. The most eye-catching ‘Weinergate’ cartoons so far …
By Michael Cavna | Comic Riffs | The Washington Post | June 6
“Sure, the target might be like shooting kingfish in a barrel, but some satirists are hitting their marks with especial flair.”

10. Critics’ Picks Video: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’
Arts Beat | The New York Times | June 6
” ‘Revolution in the Arab world is inspiring, dramatic and confusing,’ says A.O. Scott, the co-chief film critic for the New York Times. ‘The Arab Spring of 2011 is not the first time that political upheaval in the Middle East has captured the imagination of the West. Mr. Scott is referring to the events that inspired the 1962 Academy Award-winning film, “Lawrence of Arabia,” a movie he calls “a remarkably sophisticated investigation into revolution itself.’ “

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

Recommending reading: What happens when we sleep … remembering the Civil War … the ultimate Twitter archive … some Roman history … Peru’s impossible choice

1. How the Library of Congress is building the Twitter archive
By Audrey Watters | O’Reilly Radar | June 2
“In April 2010, Twitter announced it was donating its entire archive of public tweets to the Library of Congress. … That’s led to a flood of inquiries to the Library of Congress about how and when researchers will be able to gain access to the Twitter archive. These research requests were perhaps heightened by some of the changes that Twitter has made to its API and firehose access. But creating a Twitter archive is a major undertaking for the Library of Congress, and the process isn’t as simple as merely cracking open a file for researchers to peruse.”

2. The Mind after Midnight: Where Do You Go When You Go to Sleep?
Scientific American | June 3
“Based on new sleep research, there are tantalizing signposts. Join us in exploring this slumbering journey. We’ll delve into the one-eyed, half-brained sleep of some animals; eavesdrop on dreams to understand their cognitive significance; and investigate extreme and bizarre sleeping behaviors like “sleep sex” and “sleep violence.’ ”

3. Roman Ship Carried Live Fish Tank
By Rossella Lorenzi | Discovery News | June 3
“The ancient Romans might have traded live fish across the Mediterranean Sea by endowing their ships with an ingenious hydraulic system, a new investigation into a second century A.D. wreck suggests.”

4. Peruvians facing worst possible choices
By Andres Oppenheimer | The Miami Herald | June 3
“It’s hard to tell which of the presidential candidates running in Peru’s runoff elections Sunday — right-of-center Keiko Fujimori and left-of-center Ollanta Humana — would be worse for their country’s democratic institutions. Both have strong authoritarian backgrounds.”

5. Remembering the Civil War
To the Best of Our Knowledge | Feb. 20
“It’s the sesquicentennial of the Civil War — it’s been 150 years since that epic war began. Americans will commemorate and remember it from different points of view. … We’ll talk about soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield, and their reconciliation afterwards. We’ll debate the controversial legacy of the abolitionist, John Brown. And we’ll reflect on why the Civil War still has a living — and highly contested — history … even today.”

TUNES

My soundtrack for today included:
1. TEXAS FLOOD Stevie Ray Vaughan
2. STORMY WEATHER Etta James
3. THE JACKAL Ronny Jordan & Dana Bryant
4. THESE ARMS OF MINE Otis Redding
5. A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE Etta James
6. SWEET SIXTEEN (Live) B.B. King
7. SOMETHING INSIDE ME Robert Bradley
8. I COVER THE WATERFRONT John Lee Hooker
9. THE PREACHER Nitin Sawhney
10. I JUST WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU Etta James

Floods, doctorates, surrenders and Kanye

Some items that caught my eye …

NEWS

Pakistan Warns of More Floods in `Heart-Wrenching’ Disaster: Bloomberg reports, “Pakistan warned (Monday) of a new flood wave making its way south along the Indus River and more heavy monsoon rains, threatening to add to the 20 million people who have lost homes, farms and livelihoods. The forecast for further inundations in Sindh province came after United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the devastation was the worst he had ever seen and promised more emergency funding for relief operations. The UN said on Aug. 13 it had received only 20 percent of the $460 million it needs to provide aid to the homeless and hungry.”

Millions of Pakistan children at risk of flood diseases: The BBC reports, “Up to 3.5 million children are at high risk from deadly water-borne diseases in Pakistan following the country’s floods, a UN spokesman has said.” The BBC also offers a piece on the science behind the flooding.

POLITICS

Gates to leave in 2011: Foreign Policy’s Cable blog links to an interview with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who said “he plans to leave office some time in 2011, once President Obama’s Afghanistan’s strategy review is completed.” Links to the interview and to a fascinating piece speculating on who may succeed him are included.

Obama’s Youthful Voters More Likely to Skip Midterms: In the New York Times, Megan Thee-Brenan recently wrote,”Will all of those young, enthusiastic Obama voters turn out in 2010? If history is any guide, probably not. Older voters are historically more likely to cast ballots in midterm elections than are voters under the age of 30. And this year, they are already more enthusiastic than younger voters about the coming campaign.”

The First Wave of Weary Aides Heads for the Exits: Also in the Times, the White House Memo column noted somberly that “(e)ven in calmer times, the White House is a pressure cooker that can quickly burn out the most idealistic aides, but it may be even more so in an administration that inherited an economic collapse and two wars — and then decided to overhaul the nation’s health care system for good measure. Add to that the nonstop, partisan intensity of the e-mail-Internet-cable era, and it takes a toll.”

Every morning, there’s always at least one story that pisses me off: From Salon.com’s War Room blog: “Florida Republican: Put immigrants in ‘camps’ ”

ENTERTAINMENT

#kanyenewyorkertweets: Thanks to my friend Sara Ines Calderon for turning me on to this jewel. Looks like Kanye loves it. Sign up here.

LITERATURE

Recently read Library of America’s Stories of the Week: Edgar Allen Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” by William James.

HISTORY

Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat: The AP’s Slobodan Lekic writes, “(S)ome historians have argued that the Soviet (attack on Japanese forces in northeast Asia) served as effectively as … the A-bombs in ending the war. Now a new history … seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets.”

AND FINALLY …

What Exactly Is a Doctorate? From Gizmodo: “Ever wondered what getting a doctorate really means? Matt Might, professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, explains it perfectly in this graphic presentation that starts with a simple circle.” Brilliantly done.

Behind The Wall

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Rebecca Aguilar

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North River Notes

Observations on the Hudson River as it passes through New York City. The section of the Hudson which passes through New York is historically known as the North River, called this by the Dutch to distinguish it from the Delaware River, which they knew as the South River. This stretch of the Hudson is still often referred to as the North River by local mariners today. All photos copyright Daniel Katzive unless otherwise attributed. For more frequent updates, please follow northriverblog on Facebook or Instagram.