Category Archives: in the news

The Bigger They Are

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, in the news, the polis

The  erstwhile warlord of Liberia, Charles Taylor, who helped drench several African countries in blood during the 90s, is finally going down: he’s on special U.N. trial at The Hague.  (It even involves Naomi Campbell.)  A psychopath whose army specialized in child slavery, mass murder (via machete), gang rape, forced prostitution, theft of money and land and diamonds, and sometimes–supposedly–cannibalism, Tayler was also a fantastic thief, and stashed millions in various tricksy places, just like a good dictator should.  If you would like to read a few great essays about the things that were happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the middle of the previous decade–and you should, because you live on this planet too–check out Denis Johnson’s non-fiction collection,  Seek.  Available on your Kindle or lap.  Great novelists often do a great job with terrible events.

-TGR

The Trouble with Universities

Posted on by under in the news, Other Critics, the polis

It’s no secret that the American university has become a terrible, exploitative economic model, in which ever-rising undergraduate tuition and an ever-growing pool of cheap non-tenured academic labor (adjunct profs AND Ph.D. students) are being used to fund privatized defense & telecom research, athletics programs, and massive, risky investments in things like hedge funds (yes, universities are big players in the investment market which nearly destroyed the U.S. economy over the past decade). If you thought the academy was all about educating citizens, you are in for some nasty surprises.

One of the most trenchant critiques of this is Bob Samuels, a professor at UCLA who also works as a top-notch education journalist.  You can see a brief TV interview with him here (it’s from “Democracy Now!”); during it he explains his basic critique of the nation’s university system, particularly the “public” schools within it.  He also writes a superb blog called “Changing Universities.”  Its focus is the beleaguered, mismanaged University of California system I am lucky enough to call my professional home for now, but the arguments he makes are germane to all colleges and universities in the United States.  If you’re in college, or have been, or have a child who is going there, or are thinking about graduate school, or just got a graduate degree, you should be reading him.  The system is rigged, but it isn’t fucked.  There is still time to change this.

-TGR

Un-Cool, UC

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Shite n’ onions, at this rate we’ll be the University of Phoenix within ten years.  It’s bad enough that instructors are leaned on hard (the company term is more like “encouraged”) to use new-media technology even when it isn’t necessary. (E-mail and my laptop are great, but I don’t need a class blog or Twitter account to teach Walt Whitman.)  Now the University of California has begun signaling its desire to move toward complete digitization.  No more physical classes means more money for the schools (since online classes are cheap to produce, but tuition keeps going up), so who cares if it seriously degrades the education our young people are getting?  Go here for Matthew Yglesias’ thoughts on the fucked-up economic model that is the American public university.

Reason Not the Need

Posted on by under American Masculinity, in the news, sports

You may have heard that last week Lebron James made a hugely public decision about where to play basketball for the next half-decade.  Like a lot of sports fans, I was initially repulsed by how James handled his free-agency meditations.  One would think somebody so adept at navigating the media would have realized that buying up an hour of primetime on the largest sports network in North America makes you look like a dick.  (And during the World Cup!  And there were kids ranged behind him!)  Then, during the proclamation itself, I felt more sympathetic: Bron-bron looked worried and exhausted as he announced he’s going to play for the Miami Heat, and while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to have heard a bit more treacle about how “the fans in Cleveland are great and stuff, etc.” (Dan Gilbert, the Cavs’ owner, went hilariously bonkers over James’ apparent indifference), the guy was clearly agonized about something.

The sports commentariat has been yelling about The Decision for a week now.  As you might suspect, the debate is suffused with plenty of sentiment and practiced, pious outrage; a Google search and some reading will remind you that most sportswriters are sanctimonious wangs.  But there have been some good off-the-cuff pieces on James.  This one, published by Deadspin, argues that The King is not, in fact, a selfish vampire, that for all his obnoxious celebrations of himself (including that stupid nickname) he still gave seven years of marvelous on-court work to a consistently mundane team based in a cold, depressing Rust-Belt city before deciding he’d rather make less money and live in Miami and win a championship than spend the rest of his prime in the same shitty area he grew up in.  Imagine being yoked to whatever dull, corny town you were raised in . . . . Centered on James—a grown-ass man who can make his own decisions—the article is nonetheless primarily about how most of us have learned to evaluate public figures based on how they market themselves rather than on whatever real merits or skills they possess, even when we are evaluating someone as obviously, amazingly gifted as Lebron James.

Look to Bill Simmons (nom de plume The Sports Guy) for a more critical—and also typically sententious—reaction to James’ tactics.  Before turning things over to the otiose comments of his boring readers (it’s one of his lame “mailbag” posts), TSG asserts that James doesn’t have the necessary competitive psychopathology to win a championship like Jordan, et al. did.  We’ll see.  King is only 25.

After that you’ll probably want to wash up with some Charles Pierce, the splendid Boston-based writer who is always articulate and sane about sports even though he’s passionate about most of them, and who has the touch for acid skepticism that never becomes cynicism.  Scroll down through his blog and catch the thoughts on Lebron.  Really, you should be reading this guy every morning.  You’ll feel better.

-TGR

Free Market Friday

Posted on by under American Masculinity, in the news, Visual

During the past few weeks there’s been a minor Internet kerfuffle over the reputed hiring practices of the hipster clothing label American Apparel.  According to documents obtained and published by Jezebel, the women’s site of the Gawker Media network, the company has spent years intentionally hiring only hipster-hot employees (male and female) to work in its stores, which sell clothes that only fit skinny people.  If you’re chubby or wear New Balances or wire-frame glasses, sorry, but AA doesn’t want you.

Personally, while the aesthete in me appreciates the label’s preference for solid colors and fairly simple items of clothing, I’m too big and preppy to adopt AA’s orthodox look, nor do I want to.  And despite being a twenty-eight-year-old heterosexual male who hopes always to see as much of as many pretty girls as possible, I find their raunchy ad campaigns kind of gross.   By all appearances the company’s founder, Dov Charney, is greedy, pompous, and more than a bit lecherous.  American Apparel’s whole media campaign has always been brazenly, unapologetically about using the exposed skin of slender young people with interesting hair to sell slim-fit clothing.

Which is to say, the company operates like pretty much every other clothing line on earth, from Old Navy to whatever gets strutted around on runways in Milan.  Models are always physically attractive humans; even outlier types of models–e.g. “plus-size” women–have better faces and skin tones and hair than most people.  99% of us couldn’t make it as professional clothes-wearers.  We don’t look right for the part.  The young people who work retail in any chic clothing store are the “in-house” models–whatever else they do while on the clock is secondary to their main purpose, which is to visually contribute to the general aura of coolness/hipness/whatever the label is trying to gin up.

This is exactly how it should be.  American Apparel’s policy truly would be scandalous if it were based on the sort of essentialist discrimination that has long been established as culturally poisonous and destructive (misogyny, homophobia, racism, things like that).  If they sold exploding oil rigs (for example), they would also deserve legal scrutiny.  And if AA were a public institution, hiring people based on looks and sartorial taste would be not be OK: you can’t defensibly argue that Elena Kagan isn’t hot enough for the Supreme Court.  But American Apparel is a private, for-profit company.  They sell a particular brand of style–a “look”–which is clearly organized around a particular type of bodily appearance.  That is what clothing retailers do.  It’s what one must do in order to have a shot at becoming a profitable, taste-making designer.  This has always been the case.  If you don’t like how American Apparel does what it does, then don’t buy anything there.  You can even tell everyone you know how lame they are (and their policy is pretty sad, albeit realistic).  But don’t pretend that they are  accountable to some nebulous cultural standard or that how a private T-shirt company structures its business model is a huge public matter which threatens to undo the achievements of feminism.  They aren’t and it’s not.

It is also hypocritical of Jezebel to push this critique.  Their website’s tagline is “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women” (which would be annoying even if it were grammatical).  Each day they post dozens of high-res pictures of and stories about movie stars, famous designers, models, and crap like that.  Hey, guys: HOLLYWOOD AND NYC FASHION WEEK RUN ON THE SAME PRINCIPLES AS AMERICAN APPAREL.  If you don’t complain when Brad Pitt gets cast ahead of Paul Giamatti, then you have to leave Dov Charney’s creepy brand alone, too.

-TGR

because LA is a great city . . .

Posted on by under in the news

. . . with a great newspaper, here are some tidbits from the Los Angeles Times:

♣ THE VAN NUYS PORN MURDERS: a fired performer goes on a rampage with a fucking sword—it’s like a Tarantino movie!

♣ How soon until everyone in California can publicly smoke some green Prozac?

♣ The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas just got resissued.  Good stuff.  But was he a twat?

♣ To reiterate, among its many accomplishments so far, the Obama administration’s stimulus HELPED AVERT ANOTHER GREAT DEPRESSION.   Do many Americans actually understand what a depression would have entailed?  Why are most of us so revoltingly ignorant when it comes to public policy?  Again, the stimulus worked! So why do only about a third of voters think so?

♣ God, I hate Jonah Hill.  His sole “comedic” talent seems to be that he looks like a confused, obese gerbil.  With him and Russell Brand, Get Him to the Greek will almost certainly be terrible.  But could Diddy be funny? (Since, you know, he’s been unintentionally funny for years.)

♣ HULK SMASH GENDER NORMATIVITY: it isn’t from the Times, but oh man is the Twitter account “Feminist Hulk” hilarious.

-TGR

Hard-Right Resurgence in Virginia

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno

Sigh.  I had thought my beloved home state was leaving behind its idiotic reactionary, whistlin’-Dixie past and becoming a blue-ish Mid-Atlantic state, but in recent months we’ve managed to put several crypto-psychopaths into key positions in state government, including the governor’s mansion.  This last figure would be Bob McDonnell, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty “University” who successfully fooled enough voters into thinking he was a moderate instead of a greedy, dogmatic bigot.  As George Packer observes in a recent blog post,

Virginia, not traditionally an incubator of extremism, has become one of the loudest sources of opposition and nullification on the right. Its new attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, has made a national name in his efforts to end Virginia’s ban on discrimination against homosexuals at state universities and his crusade to sue the federal government over health-care reform. The state legislature recently passed a bill declaring that Virginia will not be subject to any new federal health-care reform law. Verga calls health-care reform an unconstitutional government takeover. The rhetoric keeps getting more hyperbolic, the opposition more intransigent, and the ideological tests more rigid. In a political atmosphere as overheated this, the line between ideas and action is always in danger of melting away.

-TGR

strike and counterstrike

Posted on by under in the news

Did you know that the Bush Administration’s clandestine, illegal program of torture and quasi-military imprisonment is basically the only reason America has survived the past ten years?  No?  Me neither, honestly.  But that’s the argument of a new book, Courting Disaster, by former Bush speechwriter/continued bootlicker Marc A. Thiessen.  Since I’m not a national-security expert, I can’t truly explain why Mr. Thiessen’s book is so specious, pompous, and historically inane; but the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer is, and in the latest issue she absolutely trepans Courting Disaster.  A smart, justifiably sarcastic essay that uses this thing called “evidence” that Thiessen himself seems allergic to, right here.  Dig in.

-TGR