"US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama points on his way to board his campaign plane in Columbia, Missouri, October 31, 2008"

Well, yes. He clearly is pointing. This superb photo series of Obama’s campaign is only slightly impaired by the ponderous captions.

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The lesson? The surge has not, as expected, neutralised Obama’s gains on having opposed the war. He can keep using having opposed the war, in mainstream arenas, and score real points on judgment. This is big news.

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Writing that “God has called me to a higher place,” Fulton County State Court Judge Penny Brown Reynolds on Monday notified Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue that she would resign, effective Oct. 22, to embark on her new career as a television judge on “Family Court with Judge Penny.”
- Fulton County Daily Report: Judge to Resign Next Month for TV Gig

Some Virginia judges are asking defense attorneys to refrain from patting police officers on the back in court, on the theory that the gesture suggests the existence of a “good old boy system.”
- Associated Press: Attorneys Told to End Courtroom Back-Pats

Brief shoulder massages and goosing were not specified as prejudicial.

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Last week, model MaySoon left the house voluntarily, and the housemates spent an hour imagining possible headlines: “See MaySoon,” etc. Actually, though, it barely made it into the papers at all…

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The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting!

- Washinton Post reader’s ombudsman Deborah Howell

I’ll stay out of the row over whether the 13-part epic was a wise or worthwhile move for the WaPo, largely because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the whole thing myself. But the description of the tone of the comments is instructive. From the comments on the piece itself, you’d think it was a disaster. But the comments on the reporter’s log were nicer, and those via email glowing.

The lesson? Knee-jerk comments are almost always nasty. Casual readers won’t generally bother to comment to say how much they liked a story or agreed with its view; only the enraged are engaged enough to click. Those who really like it are more likely to email in their praise. It’s sad, but most of us feel more comfortable slating something online - which makes us feel superior - than praising it, which feels a bit like weakness. If we have something nice to say, we prefer to say it in private.

Bloggers depressed at epic posts that generate nothing but sneering comments, take heart!

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- Paul Dacre, Editor in Chief, Daily Mail Group, 1999

Are electronic newspapers just a load of bullshit.com? - New Statesman, 1999

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Online sales of Domino’s pizza have surged ahead of its forecasts, as its half-year profits and sales were boosted by diners shunning restaurants in favour of eating at home…[CEO Chris Moore says] ”a lot of that is due to trading down. People are eating at home and eating out at restaurants is on the wane. Previously, this was a suspicion but there is [now] evidence that is happening.”

-Domino’s Pizza beats slowdown as diners choose to eat at home [Independent, today]

Is it time to get this “crisis” in perspective, perhaps? We’ve seen doom and gloom everywhere, we’ve seen entirely irony-free references to “austerity” and “a return to the postwar years”. And what form, exactly, does this take? People ordering Pizza instead of going out to eat. God forbid that people might get so destitute they might actually have to cook.

Astonishingly, we have to look to the Standard (of all papers) for some sense:

Going 15 years without a recession does have a downside - and one that is becoming ever more obvious.

People have forgotten, or never learned, that economic slowdowns are perfectly natural, that they are not necessarily to be feared and for the most part make very little real difference to most people’s lives.

- Recession? We’ll cope just as we did before [Anthony Hamilton, Evening Standard, yesterday]

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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: “MTV Magazine Casting” <mail@dontstayin.com>
To:
Date: 22 Mar 2008 10:52:12 +0000
Subject: MTV ARE LOOKING FOR THE YOUNG, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE COOL FACE OF LONDON. IS IT YOU?

Click here if you can’t see the e-flyer below

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UPDATE: Gaah. I may need to draw a diagram

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UPDATE 25/05/07: Well shut my mouth.

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1. The Doha round has been suspended
2. The Doha round has been abandoned
3. The collapse of the Doha round is a disaster
4. The collapse of the Doha round is the best outcome for the world’s poor
5. Abolishing agricultural subsidies in the global North is the answer to development
6. Northern agricultural subsidies make little difference to developing countries
7. It was all the US’ fault
8. It was all the EU’s fault

And so on.

Now, I do understand that the point of comment is that you add up and compare the opposing views. But is it really possible to make a comparison between these two comments?

Liz Stuart: “The Doha talks were going to be different from previous rounds… developed countries signed up to slash the billions of dollars in subsidies they pay their farmers, resulting in the dumping of prodcuts… on world markets, driving down prices and putting poor country farmers out of business.”

Daniel Davies: “Cutting EU subsidies is more or less irrelevant to most of the developing world because 95% of EU subsidies are classed a [sic] non-distorting anyway.”

There are, no doubt, naunces which bring these two views together. Probably, it’s about the difference between preventing Northern subsidies being dumped on Africa, which pretty much everyone seems to agree is a bad thing, and actually trying to set up agricultural exports into Europe from Africa, which by no means everyone agrees is a good thing. But the point is, who could possibly know from those two, seemingly irreconcilable statements?

Once again, a real conversation between viewpoints, with facts established, principles clearly outlined, assertions interrogated, is completely absent from the media coverage of this none-more-complex issue. The newspapers and TV simply haven’t got to grips with the complexity and long-term nature of the issues young people are interested in. They’ll tell you the precise order of events on the day the talks collapsed, and report, parrot-like, the succession of official statements where everyone blames everyone else. But a real, detailed discussion of the issues? No chance. The ever-growing litany of named columnists - a tiny handful of whom are any kind of expert - all weigh in, generating more heat than light. Website comment-placers repeat the same barrage of rash and often irrelevant pronouncements: “this just shows that Peter Mandelson is corrupt!” “There were no WMD!” Every site claiming to offer debate and news on the issue has an agenda.

We desperately need a new approach to complex issues like that of world trade. An interrogatory, analytical approach which will provide people with the tools to make informed decisions on the big matters. Factual assertions checked. Evidence required. Statements of principle identified and interrogated.

For the next few months I’m going to be working on Brass Tacks: Africa (working title) - an attempt to set a standard for this kind of journalism. I’ll need help, so send me any useful articles or links you have, and so on.

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10.31am. Surprising success at reading without breakfast. Am angered, though, by article in Prospect by Robert Jackson about higher education funding (read my response).

11. 21am. Philip Oltermann provides an excellent commentary on the explosive popularity of the group biography, as in The Metaphysical Club, A Night at the Majestic, etc. He argues, convincingly, that the fascination with the foundations of the soul that informed the growth of the biography have been replaced with an interest in the formation of networks, and the skill - or otherwise - of our heroes at creating them. Certainly, everything from Friends to Big Brother speaks to our obsession with the making and breaking of friendships. One popular British TV show, the recent series of Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands, made the whole basis of the competition the ability of the two teams to make, and retain, friends.

There are plenty of reasons why this should happen now. The much-commented-on breakdown of traditional communities of geography and workplace over the last fifty years, combined with the class breakdown now always referred to as “the end of deference,” means that the atificial, wordly barriers that cemented groups are also gone. Previously, sitcoms were based around a street, a bar, a family. Now, they’re based around the most arbitrary of things - a group of friends. The idea of high-minded intellectuals coming together over a mutual love of philosophy or art seemed frivolous when we were all stuck in friendships with our neighbours. Now people all over the world can come together over shared interests, or simple gelling, those networks seem like a primer on how to do it, and how not to.

And yet, there’s something emphatically not new here. Often, the things which culture deems interesting about ordinary people and intellectuals are those it deemed interesting about film stars years before. In the frenzied comtemporary press coverage of the Bloomsbury Group, the Fitzgerald/Dorothy Parker set, the Rat
Pack, or even the Brat Pack, we’ve always found celebrity friendships a source of fascination. Why? For the same reasons we’re fascinated by their romances: we like to imagine ourselves there. Men imagine being Brad Pitt to imagine being with Angelina Jolie, and women - and gay men - imagine being Angelina for the same reason (I never speak for lesbians). We watched Friends with such fondness because we imagined being one of the gang, and some of us, misguided as we are, even obsessed about Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s falling-out so we could imagine drying Paris’ tears and having her buy us cocktails. Group biography is no more than a hifalutin version of the same response - biography gave birth to celebrity culture, and now the influence has gone into reverse. A Night at the Majestic, by the marvellously-named Richard Davenport-Hines, takes as its starting-point a performance of Stravinsky’s Le Renard at the opulent Paris hotel in 1922, at which the composer was joined by James Joyce, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Proust. Who, reading that for the first time, doesn’t feel a twang of jealousy, a sense of I-should-have-been-there - as if, by proximity to a whole generation of genius, we might somehow gain a little by osmosis?

We are all scrambling around in the dark, looking for reflected light with which to illuminate ourselves. It’s just that different people take their light in different places. Group biography is an Oxbridge version of Heat magazine, but it’s none the worse for that.

11.51am. I’m itching to see Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4, a lauded but highly controversial cinematic tour through the horrors of modern-day rural Russia. Its opening sequence gives me an idea:

Under grey skies, past industrial detritus, through broken fences and mud, a prostitute traipses from a rural railway station to the funeral of a friend. The toothless old women of the town - the men, we presume, are dead - drink, curse and begin a bizarre orgy. They undress and juggle flaccid breasts. Febrile dogs chase shadows. A young man commits suicide in despair.

Doesn’t it sound great?

12.25pm. Charming, but wrongheaded, article by the wonderful Art Spiegelman in Harper’s about The Danish Cartoons (how long before that’s the name of a band?) Spiegelman’s support for the newspaper that published the cartoons is disappointing, but not surprising. More of a shock was that, without any advance warning, the article published the cartoons. I’d been studiously avoiding seeing them, on the basis that I had nothing to learn or gain from seeing racist, right-wing propaganda. I was wrong, of course. The cartoons are a mixed bag, and the oft-commented on one with a bomb-turbanned Mohammed is a subtle as a brick in the face - though not as offensive as the much subtler one portraying him with devil’s horns. But others are remarkably bland, and one cartoonist even refused the assignment altogether, instead calling the editors of the paper “reactionary provocateurs” (come to think of it, also a fabulous band name). Not that any of this negates the serious issues raised by a wilful trampling on the sensibilities of a victimised minority, but it does put a clearer light on the whole thing. I still feel Harper’s shouldn’t have published the cartoons, but perhaps a link to a location of them on the web wouldn’t have hurt. So, in the interest of debate, here they are.

1.32pm. Wonderful article about the Super Bowl, complete with an incredibly vivid portrait of Stevie Wonder:

There is something about the secondary manifestations of his blindness, the exagerrated way he lets his head flop from side to side, that suggests he has recently arrived from a distant planet, a playful, gigantic black baby who has absorbed all terrestrial sounds and language in a single gulp.

Isn’t this a wonderful idea? An enormous DeLillo-style cosmic culture-recycling machine. Maybe Stevie Wonder’s genius is that, having tapped and sang for white audiences as a childish update of the grinning negro, he turned the tables by using black music to capture and reflect the suburban white society he captivated. On the other hand, maybe not.

15.43pm. Distracted by friend invasion in uncanny echo of last time. OMG! They knocked down the old headquarters of Motown Records to make extra parking for the Super Bowl.

15.48pm. A barrage of revelations. Stevie Wonder gave Smokey Robinson “Tears of a Clown” as a Christmas present! And, the turf in the Super Bowl is artificial!

16.03pm. Nothing in the almighty brouhaha of Super Bowl XL

can match the sight of Aretha Franklin in the flesh. Rolls of fat begin just below her eyeballs and cascade down in waves to her chin, then to her neck, and down to her enormous bosom. A 300-pound mountain of congealed hurt.

16.08pm. David Samuels is fantastic. America, he contends, is not in fact a country but “a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality.”

And that’s it. It’s over. My magazine drawer is bare, my subscriptions have lasped. What, in the end, have we learned? Well, I’ve learned that, no matter how much they may purport to educate, magazines are, in the end, just entertainment - whether Harper’s or Heat, they simply can’t delve in the level of sustained detail to analyse an issue properly, to present multiple voices in a full debate. Only the capacity of a book can do that; while for the daily conversation that keeps us ticking over, newspapers and blogs are much more effective. Perhaps the rise of the lad mag and the “lifestyle” magazine marks the peak of the magazine’s role. There’s always been something contrived about the idea of a carefully selected range of stories, photoshoots and articles. In the age of consumer as king, when we wish to construct our own portfolio of interests, the magazine seems archaic.

However, I’m not sure I want to see them die. There is a certain kind of writing - rambling, slightly frivolous in its languid longwindedness, but thorough in its discussion of the issues - that suits the format, and which simply doesn’t work on the internet, where you want fast, accurate information. Of course, people still print, and a PDF-led model of distribution over the internet for reading on paper might work.

Either way, for now, my personal love affair with the magazine is over. They’re just not as stimulating, as fulfilling as books. I’m going to read a book right now.

Well, maybe I’ll just see what’s on TV…

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22:11pm. A writer from Harper’s “would like to hunt down George W. Bush and kill him with my bare hands.” Or possibly not, it’s a little ambiguous. Apparently Jose Maria Aznar’s government was toppled by a flash mob.

22:45pm. Marvellous story about a Mexican death race. One driver swerved to avoid a child in the road and flew, almost heroically, off the road into an 80-metre gully below. Unfortunately, at the bottom, he hit the crowd of people who had rushed into the road to look at the car in front of him, which had just flown into the next gully down.

23:11pm. Timothy Leary was sprung from jail by the Weather Underground, and hidden in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver. Now that has movie written all over it. Nic Cage and Samuel L Jackson. Or something.

And, time for bed again. Sunday will see the end of this godforsaken odyssey, finally freeing me to Do Better Things. Mark my words.

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21:48pm. Apparently most presidents become mentally ill in the White House, and Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the history of the world.

22:11pm. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade would apparently lead to thirty years’ Democratic hegemony, abortions for everybody, and fivers growing on trees. Apparently.

22:32pm. Blood hell! They can make broadband come out of power sockets!

23:36pm. One in five American grocery transactions takes place in a Wal-Mart. Good grief.

And it’s time for sleep - and then, groan, work - again. Only one Atlantic and half a Harper’s tackled. Tomorrow, the hill of ignorance will be conquered once and for all.

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Well, enough is enough. It’s Sunday, and I’ve put the entire day aside to clear out my magazine drawer before it gets any more overfull. And you, dear reader, can share the journey with me, in stream-of-consciousness style.

The titles list: Prospect, February, March, April 2006 editions; Colloquy, Winter and Spring 2006 editions; Jungle Drums, June 2006 edition; Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus Newsletter, Winter 2006 edition; The Pink Paper, 29 June 2006 edition; CreativeWeek, June 2006 (?) edition; Harvard Magazine, March-April 2006 edition; Harper’s, June & July 2006 editions; The Atlantic Monthly, June and July-August 2006 editions; Harvard Public Health Review, Spring 2006 edition; Gay Times, June 2006 edition.

10.30am. 20 min in. Already i have a headache. I now know that young members of Fatah and Hamas have a lot in common, and have been told (but not convinced) that, contrary to the widely-accepted theory, Britain was well-armed in the 1930’s. And now I’m off to buy some Diet Coke.

11.25am. Sentences are already starting to blur into one another. Apparently, Indian philosophy has more in common with the Western tradition than with the Chinese! Starting with Prospect may have been a mistake.

11.44am. More detail about the seemingly ever-growing list of mistakes and stupidities made by the US in Iraq. There’s a compelling drama of State/Pentagon relations in there somewhere; not just Powell as talisman, as has been done in Stuff Happens, but on an institutional level.

12.48pm. This is slow going. Electoral reform and the need for government direction of digital development, check.

12.59pm. Apparently the average “cut rate” of Hollywood films increased in the 1980’s from one every ten seconds to one every six seconds, and has stayed there since.

13.21pm. Oh my God! Ringo Starr slept with George Harrison’s wife!

16.01pm. Laptop has been monopolised by friend, prompting distraction into long Wikipedia-fest. Learnt: French people may not really exist; the song “Guantanamera,” which I always thought was Brazilian, is in fact Cuban; the British seat of Government used to be Winchesster; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Harvard students were required to learn how to make a sundial. Oh, and Greater London covers 609 sq miles. Have long way to go. Have added vodka to Diet Coke.

16.28pm. Long article about the long battle to alert Americans to the dangers of Trans Fats. I recall at Harvard there were signs everywhere noting that the food served in the H-Bomb’s many canteens was trans-fat free. The article waxes about the dangers of the fats, one of the four main types, the others being the better-known saturated, unsaturated and monounsaturated. The American authorities are now warning against trans fat consumption, which appears to have no positive effects whatsoever and substantially increase heart disease risks (apparently, while both saturated and trans fats increase “bad” cholesterol, trans fats also reduce “good” cholesterol). And yet for some reason, I’ve never heard anything about it over here. Is Europe oblivious to this threat? Or does our food contain fewer trans fats anyway? Given Harvard’s neverending boasting about its Global University status, it’s a bit of a damning
indictment of the article that it doesn’t mention the situation elsewhere.

16.35pm. Bloody hell: more people die each year in the US of suicide than of murder.

17.36pm. John Maynard Keynes was gay!

18.14pm. Finished Gay Times. Learnt nothing of interest, besides the above.

19.09pm. Apparently containment can work with Iran, and the interior western US might turn Democrat.

20.16pm. I really need to stop and call my mother; 2 Harper’s and 2 Prospects to go! In other news, apparently information management is going to be transformed by a new open-source program called Chandler. But not yet, and besides, it kind of looks like Outlook to me.

20.44pm I give up. I’ve just found another Atlantic I hadn’t noticed; so I now have more to read than I did an hour ago. It’s no good. There’s at least another day’s worth of reading to go.

How do people do this? Somebody reads these bloody things, and it’s not normally the unemployed. And I’ve gained nothing. Granted, I’ve learnt a lot of factoids and been exposed to some interesting ideas, but not one has been exhaustively explored in the way that could allow me to form an actual opinion of my own. I know, it’s supposed to be a “jumping-off point for further research.” But if there’s barely time to read the articles themselves, how the hell are you supposed to make time for advanced googling?

I guess the problem stems from my hedging my bets. Pick a mag and stick to it, I guess that’s the lesson. There are Economist people and LRB people, and then there are those people for whom the Saturday Guardian provides a week’s stimulation. I need to face facts and become one of these. But which one? Suggestions welcome….

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Support comes from Mary, who, bless her, isn’t very funny, but tries hard. And her rubbish moments just make you appreciate Greg more. I always imagine her with a big blonde perm and a pink tunic, slightly patrician-y. Again, I daren’t look at the website, as she’s probably a lank-haired dropout.

Anyway, here’s the website, and here’s the rss/podcast feed.

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