| Fitzgerald the Pro |
[04 Aug 2015|09:45am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/f_scott_fitzgerald_s_lost_story_temperature_reviewed.html “All my stories are conceived like novels,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote his literary agent, Harold Ober, and that was the problem. As with his novels, the stories each required “one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had.” Fitzgerald came to resent his stories because the steady dripping of those drops, shed to earn the cash he needed to survive, was drained from the novels he considered his real life’s work.
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| Wonder |
[04 Aug 2015|02:42pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/08/frank_wilczek_s_a_beautiful_question_reviewed.html When does it first strike you, this feeling? When you’re a kid, seeing the ocean weave through trees from the back seat of your parents’ car? In high school, perched on warm bleachers and watching the sun flare bright against the tubas in the marching band? Or perhaps you’re swimming in a backyard pool, squinting up at the black tarp of night above, and the feeling seeps into your ears along with the water. Later in life, it finds you in smaller moments. When you’re spreading magazines in a neat spiral on a coffee table, or curling your fingers around the pleasantly rounded edges of a cellphone. Sometimes those big, chest-swelling moments come back: You’re camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, or driving to the dentist’s office in slopping rain, or sitting on the shore with your toes in hot, wet sand—and it’s there once more.
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| Israel’s Occupation Killed Ali Dawabsheh |
[04 Aug 2015|06:54pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/08/ali_dawabsheh_was_burned_alive_by_suspected_jewish_settlers_israel_s_occupation.html It’s tempting to treat last week’s tragic murder of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, burned alive in his bed as the result of a firebomb thrown by suspected Jewish settlers, as somehow separate from the occupation through which Israel has ruled the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza since 1967. Israeli officials have certainly been at pains to make that case, condemning the murder and promising swift action. But we should note that Ali was the fourth Palestinian killed over the previous week and a half. The reality is that Ali’s murder is only a particularly shocking expression of the violence that Israel’s occupation exacts upon Palestinian civilians every day. And any genuine effort to put a stop to extremist violence in the West Bank, by Israelis or Palestinians, requires a fuller awareness of how that extremism is driven by the occupation, and of the role that the U.S. has played in sustaining it.
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| Hillary Wants to Tell You About Her Mom |
[04 Aug 2015|10:24pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ad_report_card/2015/08/hillary_s_first_campaign_ads_clinton_spots_refer_to_obama_as_the_man_who.html The Spot: We see Hillary Clinton addressing us, in close-up, interspersed with old black-and-white photos of her now-deceased mother, Dorothy. After recounting the details of her mother’s grim childhood—“abandoned by her parents at age 8, sent from Chicago to L.A. to live with grandparents who didn’t want her”—Clinton explains that she’s running for president so that she can help people like her mom. “I think about all the Dorothys all over America,” she says, as the scene switches to a shot of Clinton shaking the hand of a small, smiling girl. The closing image is a photo of Clinton and Dorothy, side by side, both in blazers, both sporting carefully coiffed bobs.
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