How pleased was I yesterday to get the current issue of my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, and see an article written by one of my favorite writers, Mr. Coates. Even though the article was about a topic (rap music) that I have very little interest in, and about an artist (Doom) that I had never heard of, I eagerly read it.
I am so proud that our very own Mr. Coates is now appearing in The New Yorker. Excellent!
BTW, is the hotel you stayed at, in L.A., The Standard? I ask because the last time I was in L.A., I stayed at the Standard and the way you describe it sounds remarkably like my experience there.
Thank you. And yeah that was The Standard. I left it out because I didn't want to sound like I was name-checking or giving free advertisement. That place was crazy.
I read that yesterday. I really liked Latimer's voice. I thought Scott McClellan's memoir was really self-serving, he discovered a conscience after it was time to cash in. Of course, Latimer's is self-serving too, but at least it's self-serving from the right!
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." - Joan Didion
Very unflattering, though not unpredictable, portrayal of Bush.
The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options. He always believed Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. “Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,” he once said (except he didn’t say “keister”). He didn’t think much of Barack Obama. After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.” He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”
One final reminder for anyone interested in participating in the fans of TNC football pick 'em league. About 35-40 people have already joined. The sign up information is here:
To reiterate a few things, scoring starts in Week 2, so you have not missed out on anything if you didn't sign up last week. Just get your picks in by Sunday and you'll be fine (you can always join after that, but you'll be at a disadvantage compared to teams that have already earned points). The rules are simple -- just pick the winner of every NFL game each week -- and a full rules explanation is posted on the message board on the pick 'em league homepage. Finally, just a reminder, the Yahoo ID you use to sign up will be visible to other league members, and you'll have a choice as to whether you want your email to be displayed. If you want to keep these things private, it's easy to create a free Yahoo account just for the league and be sure to choose to hide your email account when you're setting up your team (or anytime after that by editing your team settings).
and he took down his original race-baiting post. i really think that Rod is starting to question a lot of his long held beliefs on race and conservatism. now, if we could only get him some minority friends...
It's exhausting exhausting the racial angle behind every dustup. I can't believe some of the overtly racist comments on philly.com and other newspapers, it makes me wonder what the ones they delete are like! Frankly, I'm surprised reputable newspapers (the Post Dispatch, for example) even bother with comments sections, little good can come of them. (Is there anything stupider than a sports thread? "Your team *sucks*!")
Two of my Facebook friends were making a big deal out of the St. Louis incident, saying how if the roles had been reversed Al Sharpton would have been on the scene immediately. It made me brush up on the Jena Six (I found a great Atlantic article on the subject in the process).
The St. Louis incident reminded me of the article we discussed a few weeks ago, "A Mugging on Lake Street." In that article, the beating was racially motivated, I think. We the school bus beating racially motivated? I don't know. I know Mike Tyson would have been allowed to sit in that particular seat... would Steve Urkel have?
I think that's a great comparison. I thought of the mugging article as soon as I read about the incident on the bus. There is no way to know if the kid was beat because he was white.
But you're right, we know that it probably had more to do with him being an 'Urkel,' than a 'Mike Tyson.'
lol...I've been following this guy's campaign to outlaw divorce for awhile now. Does anyone know what many cultural conservatives think about this? Are they taking him seriously?
Some guy named Dan Riehl from "Riehl World View." He appears on Fox News occasionally.
Anyway, he shows how rough, and tough, and manly he is by bragging that he and a few other 9/12 protestors could have beaten up a bunch of black teenagers at the back of the DC Metro if he really wanted to. It's funny because his header is "Dangerous times." And what caused him to think that we live in "Dangerous Times?" A couple of black kids talking smack about John McCain.
"Michelle has a disturbing video posted. It's of several black students beating a white student on a school bus in St. Louis. Here's the deal. I haven't mentioned it before.
"Riding out of DC on the Metro, 9/12, there were some folks from South Dakota and also another Mid-West state I can't recall in the same Metro car. We were talking, nothing special, really - politics, of course.
"In the back were maybe ten or so black kids taking up that section of the car. There was no confrontation, just one or two of them talking loudly enough to make sure they'd be heard.
"Without resorting to the poor diction it was along the lines of, these are the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ. That McCain he wasn't chit. Obama's going to be president as long as he wants, so these people better get used to it, etc. It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed.
"We just ignored them without much trouble at all.
"Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn't have lasted very long. Maybe if they were bigger, or more numerous, it might have been worse. Or it may not have happened at all. Who knows?
"But what's unfortunately becoming increasingly clear is that, for the people who thought Obama's election would make America post-racial? I'm afraid you're wrong. Some of the potential racial narratives that may still play out during his presidency might not be that pretty at all.
"I can't say as I'm not concerned that America might not end up more racially divided than we've been in 30 years. And that burden is as much, if not more Obama's to carry as it is anyone else's. Whether he's up to that along with everything else, we'll have to wait and see."
Oh, this dude is COMEDY. Like MM, Rush et al, he's really just engaging in performance art. And I like how these race-baiters conveniently forget that 1)the black kids who WEREN'T cheering actually tried to help the white kid and 2)there were other white kids present on the bus. But I doubt those facts would matter to them anyway.
Funny, I was on the metro on 9/12 w/ my girlfriend (we're early 20s white girls). My girlfriend also started to talk smack about the protestors loud enough for them to hear them. I told her she better watch it b/c "real Americans" like to pack heat.
I'm about to take my wife on our first trip to NYC. Does anyone have any recommendations for good, (relatively) cheap places to eat? We're staying near Little Italy, but any place that we can get to via the subway fairly easily would be fine.
Momofuku noodle bar is outstanding, in the Lower East Side. There's another Momofuku which is more of an upscale restaurant (same owner) but the noodle bar is very good at reasonable prices
I expected more from this group. I grew up in CT a decade ago so I'm a little out of touch with nyc spots. I'll ask some friends tho and try to get back to ya.
Try going to the Chowhound site, the NYC board. If you love food, the posters there are your friends. The last time I lived in NYC (a couple of years ago) I had a phat expense account, so I wouldn't be of much help unless you want the names of a couple of splurge worthy resto's, then I'm your girl!
I like The Atlantic Wire overall--nice having someone organize a searchable round up of opinion.
But in looking at The Atlantic50--the top 50 "most influential commentators in the nation"--I realized that the "Washington Insiders" polled to determine this special group and I don't follow many of the same folks. For one, it's very heavy on The Washington Post, which makes geographical sense but in general I don't find the Post's columnists that interesting in ideas or expression. Radio and cable news polemicists also do well and I know they've got killer ratings, but does DC really look to Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Olbermann and Maddow? Oi. There were only a handful of bloggers--TNC, sadly not among them. And, as an avid reader of The New Yorker, I was also surprised to see that Hendrik Hertzberg barely made the cut at #50.
There's some overlap but, on the whole, DC and I feed from different troughs. And I find that both disturbing and somehow affirming.
Web Engagement: In partnership with PostRank, a company specializing in filtering social media data, the Wire analyzed top commentators on 16 measures of webiness, including mentions on Twitter and performance on popular social media sites like Digg and Deliciouso.
30 Mosques in 30 Days is a really cool project that I've been reading about lately. Two South Asian Muslims in their twenties decided to visit a different New York City mosque every day in honor of Ramadan. Some of the posts are quite moving.
Thanks for that link, TigerLily. There are a bunch of mosques in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I'm gonna have to follow the rest of this to see if they make a visit to one of them.
Yeah, it's being met with mostly laughs by those outside the situation. A bar near my office called "Bad Decisions" has already decided to run a Highlander marathon in honor of the people in that house being safe.
I saw that and as someone who played at Kenjutsu, I can say that anyone who has ever handled a 'real' samurai weapon knows how unimaginably dangerous they can be. The Baltimore Sun article quotes someone saying that it takes "skill". Uhh, not really. Even with a decent quality replica, horrific injuries are just a casual, joshing around, mistep away. It looks cool and all to have one, and wave it around... until you cut off your friend's ARM. I for one, won't be in the room with one, if I'm not holding it.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
How pleased was I yesterday to get the current issue of my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, and see an article written by one of my favorite writers, Mr. Coates. Even though the article was about a topic (rap music) that I have very little interest in, and about an artist (Doom) that I had never heard of, I eagerly read it.
I am so proud that our very own Mr. Coates is now appearing in The New Yorker. Excellent!
BTW, is the hotel you stayed at, in L.A., The Standard? I ask because the last time I was in L.A., I stayed at the Standard and the way you describe it sounds remarkably like my experience there.
Thank you. And yeah that was The Standard. I left it out because I didn't want to sound like I was name-checking or giving free advertisement. That place was crazy.
Stayed there once on business and had the same reaction -- the woman in the fish tank and all that.
GQ has an excerpt from a book by former G.W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer. Check it out.
I read that yesterday. I really liked Latimer's voice. I thought Scott McClellan's memoir was really self-serving, he discovered a conscience after it was time to cash in. Of course, Latimer's is self-serving too, but at least it's self-serving from the right!
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." - Joan Didion
Very unflattering, though not unpredictable, portrayal of Bush.
He seems to like the guy, too, which somehow makes it more damning.
Does anyone find it weird that Pres. George W. Bush referred to Pres. Obama as, "this cat?"
http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_10957&pageNum=7
The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options. He always believed Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. “Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,” he once said (except he didn’t say “keister”). He didn’t think much of Barack Obama. After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.” He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”
That excerpt is full of Bush saying things to no one in particular. I liked the, "What is this, a cruel hoax?" story.
Sounds like "cat" was one of his go-to words--not something special for Obama.
And Schloss1, I totally laughed out loud at "What is this, a cruel hoax?" Got to work that line into conversation more.
I'm much more concerned about GWB thinking he "was qualified"
You know, sometimes the right-wing is right. I do love to hate him. Or at least I do until I remember how badly he fucked this country.
One final reminder for anyone interested in participating in the fans of TNC football pick 'em league. About 35-40 people have already joined. The sign up information is here:
http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/pickem
Group ID#: 61825
Password: tanehisi
To reiterate a few things, scoring starts in Week 2, so you have not missed out on anything if you didn't sign up last week. Just get your picks in by Sunday and you'll be fine (you can always join after that, but you'll be at a disadvantage compared to teams that have already earned points). The rules are simple -- just pick the winner of every NFL game each week -- and a full rules explanation is posted on the message board on the pick 'em league homepage. Finally, just a reminder, the Yahoo ID you use to sign up will be visible to other league members, and you'll have a choice as to whether you want your email to be displayed. If you want to keep these things private, it's easy to create a free Yahoo account just for the league and be sure to choose to hide your email account when you're setting up your team (or anytime after that by editing your team settings).
Is anyone else surprised that Rod Dreher called out Limbaugh for his race-baiting over the St. Louis school bus incident? Andrew linked to it.
Also, how do people feel about the Blueprint 3?
and he took down his original race-baiting post. i really think that Rod is starting to question a lot of his long held beliefs on race and conservatism. now, if we could only get him some minority friends...
then he could make racist comments and say he has black friends?
ha...i guess you have a (cynical) point.
It's exhausting exhausting the racial angle behind every dustup. I can't believe some of the overtly racist comments on philly.com and other newspapers, it makes me wonder what the ones they delete are like! Frankly, I'm surprised reputable newspapers (the Post Dispatch, for example) even bother with comments sections, little good can come of them. (Is there anything stupider than a sports thread? "Your team *sucks*!")
Two of my Facebook friends were making a big deal out of the St. Louis incident, saying how if the roles had been reversed Al Sharpton would have been on the scene immediately. It made me brush up on the Jena Six (I found a great Atlantic article on the subject in the process).
The St. Louis incident reminded me of the article we discussed a few weeks ago, "A Mugging on Lake Street." In that article, the beating was racially motivated, I think. We the school bus beating racially motivated? I don't know. I know Mike Tyson would have been allowed to sit in that particular seat... would Steve Urkel have?
I think that's a great comparison. I thought of the mugging article as soon as I read about the incident on the bus. There is no way to know if the kid was beat because he was white.
But you're right, we know that it probably had more to do with him being an 'Urkel,' than a 'Mike Tyson.'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/john-marcotte-california_n_287796.html
lol...I've been following this guy's campaign to outlaw divorce for awhile now. Does anyone know what many cultural conservatives think about this? Are they taking him seriously?
Poser Alert!
Some guy named Dan Riehl from "Riehl World View." He appears on Fox News occasionally.
Anyway, he shows how rough, and tough, and manly he is by bragging that he and a few other 9/12 protestors could have beaten up a bunch of black teenagers at the back of the DC Metro if he really wanted to. It's funny because his header is "Dangerous times." And what caused him to think that we live in "Dangerous Times?" A couple of black kids talking smack about John McCain.
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/09/a-912-experience-dangerous-times.html
Here is his entire post:
A 9/12 Experience: Dangerous Times
"Michelle has a disturbing video posted. It's of several black students beating a white student on a school bus in St. Louis. Here's the deal. I haven't mentioned it before.
"Riding out of DC on the Metro, 9/12, there were some folks from South Dakota and also another Mid-West state I can't recall in the same Metro car. We were talking, nothing special, really - politics, of course.
"In the back were maybe ten or so black kids taking up that section of the car. There was no confrontation, just one or two of them talking loudly enough to make sure they'd be heard.
"Without resorting to the poor diction it was along the lines of, these are the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ. That McCain he wasn't chit. Obama's going to be president as long as he wants, so these people better get used to it, etc. It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed.
"We just ignored them without much trouble at all.
"Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn't have lasted very long. Maybe if they were bigger, or more numerous, it might have been worse. Or it may not have happened at all. Who knows?
"But what's unfortunately becoming increasingly clear is that, for the people who thought Obama's election would make America post-racial? I'm afraid you're wrong. Some of the potential racial narratives that may still play out during his presidency might not be that pretty at all.
"I can't say as I'm not concerned that America might not end up more racially divided than we've been in 30 years. And that burden is as much, if not more Obama's to carry as it is anyone else's. Whether he's up to that along with everything else, we'll have to wait and see."
Sadly No! did that post dirty:
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/24978.html
Oh, this dude is COMEDY. Like MM, Rush et al, he's really just engaging in performance art. And I like how these race-baiters conveniently forget that 1)the black kids who WEREN'T cheering actually tried to help the white kid and 2)there were other white kids present on the bus. But I doubt those facts would matter to them anyway.
Funny, I was on the metro on 9/12 w/ my girlfriend (we're early 20s white girls). My girlfriend also started to talk smack about the protestors loud enough for them to hear them. I told her she better watch it b/c "real Americans" like to pack heat.
Somehow I doubt Riehl would call you "technically thugs."
I'm about to take my wife on our first trip to NYC. Does anyone have any recommendations for good, (relatively) cheap places to eat? We're staying near Little Italy, but any place that we can get to via the subway fairly easily would be fine.
Momofuku noodle bar is outstanding, in the Lower East Side. There's another Momofuku which is more of an upscale restaurant (same owner) but the noodle bar is very good at reasonable prices
I expected more from this group. I grew up in CT a decade ago so I'm a little out of touch with nyc spots. I'll ask some friends tho and try to get back to ya.
Try going to the Chowhound site, the NYC board. If you love food, the posters there are your friends. The last time I lived in NYC (a couple of years ago) I had a phat expense account, so I wouldn't be of much help unless you want the names of a couple of splurge worthy resto's, then I'm your girl!
I'm curious if anyone has checked out The Atlantic50: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/people/index/.
I like The Atlantic Wire overall--nice having someone organize a searchable round up of opinion.
But in looking at The Atlantic50--the top 50 "most influential commentators in the nation"--I realized that the "Washington Insiders" polled to determine this special group and I don't follow many of the same folks. For one, it's very heavy on The Washington Post, which makes geographical sense but in general I don't find the Post's columnists that interesting in ideas or expression. Radio and cable news polemicists also do well and I know they've got killer ratings, but does DC really look to Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Olbermann and Maddow? Oi. There were only a handful of bloggers--TNC, sadly not among them. And, as an avid reader of The New Yorker, I was also surprised to see that Hendrik Hertzberg barely made the cut at #50.
There's some overlap but, on the whole, DC and I feed from different troughs. And I find that both disturbing and somehow affirming.
I think this says everything you need to know:
Web Engagement: In partnership with PostRank, a company specializing in filtering social media data, the Wire analyzed top commentators on 16 measures of webiness, including mentions on Twitter and performance on popular social media sites like Digg and Deliciouso.
30 Mosques in 30 Days is a really cool project that I've been reading about lately. Two South Asian Muslims in their twenties decided to visit a different New York City mosque every day in honor of Ramadan. Some of the posts are quite moving.
http://30mosques.tumblr.com/
Thanks for that link, TigerLily. There are a bunch of mosques in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I'm gonna have to follow the rest of this to see if they make a visit to one of them.
Ta-Nehisi,
Did you see this news item from your old hometown: Johns Hopkins student kills intruder with Samurai Sword?
Yeah, it's being met with mostly laughs by those outside the situation. A bar near my office called "Bad Decisions" has already decided to run a Highlander marathon in honor of the people in that house being safe.
The first movie reference that came to mind for me was Kill Bill. But the first Highlander movie was a classic.
I saw that and as someone who played at Kenjutsu, I can say that anyone who has ever handled a 'real' samurai weapon knows how unimaginably dangerous they can be. The Baltimore Sun article quotes someone saying that it takes "skill". Uhh, not really. Even with a decent quality replica, horrific injuries are just a casual, joshing around, mistep away. It looks cool and all to have one, and wave it around... until you cut off your friend's ARM. I for one, won't be in the room with one, if I'm not holding it.
Geez. Frank Schaeffer just went all Lawrence O'donnell on the Rachel Maddow show talking about the religious right. Good Stuff.