Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 63

Writing a Column for the New York Times Is Harder Than It Looks

Any day that I have a column coming out in the New York Times is a good one. The megaphone of the Times' edit page is rather ridiculous. I'm half-expecting Kendrick Lamar himself to text me -- not because the column is so extraordinary, but because a shocking number, and range, of people read it. I've never seen anything like it. This causes no small amount of stress when I'm writing. I don't want to embarrass myself by saying something lazy or stupid. And I also want to sound good.
I'm always flattered to get tweets or comments from people barking at Andy Rosenthal to give me a job. This conveniently overlooks the fact that I have a job, and that the edit page has a full roster of columnists. But more than that, it ignores the fact that my writing for the Times is rather irregular, and that I endure none of the pressures that a Gail Collins or David Brooks must cope with.
Here is an exercise: Spend a week counting all the original ideas you have. Then try to write each one down, in all its nuance, in 800 words. Perhaps you'd be very successful at this. Now try to do it for four weeks. Then two months, then six, then a year, then five years. Add on to that all other ambitions you might have -- teaching, blogging, writing long-form articles, speaking, writing books. etc. How do you think you'd fare? I won't go so far as to say I'd fail. But I strongly suspect that the some of the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would -- inside of a year -- be tweeting, "Remember when that dude could actually write? Oh that's right, he never could write. #lulz"
I end up recycling ideas in my own blogging, and blogging is a much more forgiving form. I can't imagine how'd cope with the demands of staying fresh for a regular column. The point I'm making isn't that you shouldn't criticize columnists at the Times (I've done my share of criticizing), but that you should have some sense of the built-in structural limitations of the form. They are formidable.
Those columns generally take me three to five days to pull together. They are a good bit of work. And then there's the fact-check the night before they're published. So while I appreciate the compliments, and I really do, I'm actually left with a grudging respect for the job of columnists. It really is a lot harder than it looks.

Writing a Column for the New York Times Is Harder Than You Think

Any day that I have a column coming out in the New York Times is a good one. The megaphone of the Times' edit page is rather ridiculous. I'm half-expecting Kendrick Lamar himself to text me -- not because the column is so extraordinary, but because a shocking number, and range, of people read it. I've never seen anything like it. This causes no small amount of stress when I'm writing. I don't want to embarrass myself by saying something lazy or stupid. And I also want to sound good.
I'm always flattered to get tweets or comments from people barking at Andy Rosenthal to give me a job. This conveniently overlooks the fact that I have a job, and that the edit page has a full roster of columnists. But more than that, it ignores the fact that my writing for the Times is rather irregular, and that I endure none of the pressures that a Gail Collins or David Brooks must cope with.
Here is an exercise: Spend a week counting all the original ideas you have. Then try to write each one down, in all its nuance, in 800 words. Perhaps you'd be very successful at this. Now try to do it for four weeks. Then two months, then six, then a year, then five years. Add on to that all other ambitions you might have -- teaching, blogging, writing long-form articles, speaking, writing books. etc. How do you think you'd fare? I won't go so far as to say I'd fail. But I strongly suspect that the some of the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would -- inside of a year -- be tweeting, "Remember when that dude could actually write? Oh that's right, he never could write. #lulz"
I end up recycling ideas in my own blogging, and blogging is a much more forgiving form. I can't imagine how'd cope with the demands of staying fresh for a regular column. The point I'm making isn't that you shouldn't criticize columnists at the Times (I've done my share of criticizing), but that you should have some sense of the built-in structural limitations of the form. They are formidable.
Those columns generally take me three to five days to pull together. They are a good bit of work. And then there's the fact-check the night before they're published. So while I appreciate the compliments, and I really do, I'm actually left with a grudging respect for the job of columnists. It really is a lot harder than it looks.

Elections Have Consequences—for Dick Morris

Tricky Dick, we totally knew ya:

No more Fox News contributor Dick Morris. His contract to spout republic-damaging nonsense on Fox airwaves has expired, and the network isn't renewing it. Taken together with the news that Sarah Palin will no longer be contributing, the Morris development is strong evidence that Fox News has glimpsed the underside of allowing charlatans to brand its coverage. Palin was a roboto-contributor, who responded to everything with a little crack on the lamestream media and a reference President Obama's socialist heart.
As for Morris's misdeeds, well, everyone knows what they are. That's because Fox News presented them so prominently in the run-up to last year's presidential election. In his prime-time, pre-election appearances, Morris was among the few pundits who wouldn't hedge his bets; who wouldn't triangulate his way through the polling numbers; who wouldn't rummage through scenario after scenario in his analysis. No, Dick Morris was predicting a Mitt Romney landslide. Fox News fell for it, and surely millions of Americans did as well.

The problem with Dick Morris is the problem with all the other pundits who were unskewing and consulting their feelings -- they were bullshitting. It's not so much that they were wrong, it's that they didn't care. Most of those pundits are still in power. 
This isn't merely a problem that pops up during elections. Over the weekend I went on a Twitter rant about Glen Kessler's column on Obama's skeet-shoot claims. What I had forgotten, amid my anger, is that Kessler's "fact check" is, itself, a part of the entertainment style of political reporting. Part of this is us. This kind of media exists for a reason. People consume it.

The Life and Death of Great Virtual Cities

Friends. The great Clive Thompson  (Wired, The Times Magazine, New York) is doing some writing on virtual communities and how and why they hold together. He is actually writing a book, and I think he may well be covering more than that. But this morning we spent an hour or so talking about The Horde, much of it concerned with what works and what doesn't. As you guys know, I've been very interested in this question.
At any rate I mentioned to Clive that you guys have a Facebook group and have had meetups here in New York, in Washington D.C. and in Chicago. (Anywhere else? Seattle maybe?) Clive was interested in talking to some of you about this community and how it works. I'm opening this space hoping you guys can share any insights. Clive will be jumping in to conversate. Please share your experiences.
On a sidenote Clive is one of the most interesting thinkers I've ever had the luxury of interacting with. When we were talking this morning he had an ability to take the long theories of community I was expressing, and render them in five words. (That's his headline.) He is also the spouse of the best television critic in the business,

Kendrick Lamar Among the Wonks

I wrote a column today for The New York Times riffing off many of our previous conversation around Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid M.A.A.D City. The album is incredible. It is that rare work of art that gets better the more you hear it. I was tweeting last night with commenter David White about how incredulous I was about comparisons between Good Kid and Illmatic. David made a great point: The comparisons are the kind of hyperbole that leave you skeptical, until you actually sit down and listen to the album.
At any rate, what I most appreciate is how Good Kid evokes the wages of living in a world where lethal violence is the norm:

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.
"Good Kid" is narrative told from behind the mask. Fantasies of rage and lust are present, but fear pervades Lamar's world. He pitches himself not as "Compton's Most Wanted" but as "Compton's Human Sacrifice." He loves the city, even as he acknowledges that the city is trying to kill him. "If Pirus and Crips all got along," he says, "They'd probably gun me down by the end of this song...."
I must confess my bias. I grew up in Baltimore during a time when the city was in the thrall of crack and Saturday night specials. I've spent most of my life in neighborhoods suffering their disproportionate share of gun violence. In each of these places it was not simply the deaths that have stood out to me, but the way that death corrupted the most ordinary of rituals. On an average day in middle school, fully a third of my brain was obsessed with personal safety. I feared the block 10 times more than any pop quiz. My favorite show in those days was "The Wonder Years." When Kevin Arnold went to visit his lost-found love Winnie Cooper, he simply hopped on his bike. In Baltimore, calling upon our Winnie Coopers meant gathering an entire crew. There was safety in numbers. Alone, we were targets.

The point I tried to make in the column was that people who don't listen to rap, but regularly work on gun violence issues, should really give this album several listens. And I don't think the profanity is a real excuse not to. The album deserves to be engaged. Hip-hop expresses the id of young boys. I'm not really convinced that that id is any more horrifying than the rest of our mass entertainment. That is not a defense of misogyny. I think everybody sins. But somehow, black people always seem to sin worse.

The Legality of the White Paper and Summary Execution

Jeffrey Rosen looks at the legality of the White Paper on extrajudicial killing and finds it "troubling on many levels." Here Rosen zeroes in on the notion that execution is warranted, if capture is infeasible:

When officials conclude that "capture is infeasible," the memo continues, "the intrusion of any Fourth Amendment interests would be outweighed by .... the interest in protecting the lives of Americans." But of course, the question of whether American lives are, in fact, imminently threatened by a particular suspect is precisely the determination that the administration claims the right to make on its own--without an opportunity for an independent judge to examine the factual basis for the claim. "There exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations," the Justice Department insists.
This "trust us" argument is precisely the one the Supreme Court rejected in the 2004 Hamdi, where the Court upheld the Bush administration's power to detain enemy combatants, on the grounds that it had been authorized by Congress, but only after insisting that suspects could challenge the factual basis for their detention before a neutral decision maker. The Obama administration repeatedly invokes the Hamdi case to justify targeted assassinations, which have been specifically prohibited by Congress, and then omits the Supreme Court's requirement that independent judges need to have the last word on whether or not suspects are, in fact, as dangerous as the administration claims.

Over at Wired, David Kravets's reporting finds similarly dubious legality:

Much in the white paper rests on the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to pursue al-Qaida. Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration white paper rejects any geographical restriction on where it can launch its drone strikes and commando raids. But the Bush administration actually stopped short of declaring that it had the authority to kill American citizens.
Eugene R. Fidell, president emeritus of the National Institute of Military Justice and a Yale Law School military legal scholar, disputes that the AUMF is a proper legal basis for extrajudicial killings globally of U.S. citizens.
"It is not a general declaration of war on every Islamic extremist in the world," Fidell said of the AUMF. "There are limits."
He added that the Authorization for Use of Military Force was not a "global warrant" to go after every terrorist, and that Congress must change the law to comport with the Obama administration's legal theory for it to stick.

Via Conor Friedersdorf, here is something else I missed. When 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by this administration, Robert Gibbs responded in the following manner:

ADAMSON: ... It's an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he's underage. He's a minor. GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business. 

I find that answer unconscionable. More from Conor here.

What Would Orwell Make of Obama's Drone Policy?

On the advice of the Horde, I took up George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." This passage seems especially appropriate today:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

I thought of that passage while reading through this white paper (brought to us by the dutiful reporting of Mike Isikoff), which lays out when, precisely, the administration believes it is entitled to order a drone strike against an American citizen. (Read the full memo at the bottom of this post.) The answer falls short of "whenever we want," but it skirts damn close:

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be "senior operational leaders" of al-Qaida or "an associated force" -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. 
The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration's most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

All of this is done in secret, a prospect which Adam Serwer rightly finds chilling:

The Obama administration claims that the secret judgment of a single "well-informed high level administration official" meets the demands of due process and is sufficient justification to kill an American citizen suspected of working with terrorists. That procedure is entirely secret. Thus it's impossible to know which rules the administration has established to protect due process and to determine how closely those rules are followed. The government needs the approval of a judge to detain a suspected terrorist. To kill one, it need only give itself permission.

I highly advise you to read the memo. The powers it claims are broad and, as Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow's show, actually contradict some of the administration's public statements and enter into Orwell's world of false language rendered to conceal an arguments "too brutal for most people to take." 
Consider the notion of "imminence." Last year Eric Holder claimed that a lethal strike against an American citizen can only be made if to protect against "an imminent threat of violent attack." But the white paper states that imminence "does not require that the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests will take place in the significant future." Effectively, the word "imminence" has no meaning beyond "we think you're a bad guy."
The white paper further claims that it can carry out operations "with the consent of the host nation's government," and then moves on to declare that such operations would still be lawful "after a determination that the host nation is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted." In other words, we will ask your consent, but we don't really need it.
This kind of language -- imminence that isn't, consent at gun-point -- runs throughout the white paper. It authorizes, for instance, not just the killing of Al Qaeda leaders, but of any "an associated force." Who determines what constitutes "an associated force?" The same people ordering the killing. 
I don't want to be thick-witted here. I understand that on some level a democracy generally elects human leaders who will not abuse the spirit of the law. I think Barack Obama is such a leader. That is for the historians to determine. But practically, much of our foreign policy now depends on the hope of benevolent dictators and philosopher kings. The law can't help. The law is what the kings say it is.

Justice Department Memo on Legal Case for Drone Strikes on Americans by Becki Jayne Equality Harrelson

Visualizing a Sham Social Contract

For the past few weeks we've talked about what a broken contract means for black America. As such, these images really hit me hard. I can't think of any better way to capture what we mean than to see children excluded from a world sheerly by dint of skin color. Again, it is worth consider what message the society was attempting to send black people.

The images were taken by Gordon Parks in 1956 in an attempt to depict Jim Crow America. The sad fact is that in the North, similar messages were being sent out. From Gordon Parks' Wikipedia page -- "When Parks was eleven years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, knowing he couldn't swim."

The Lost Battalion

It's yours...

Some Notes on 'The Dish'

My old buddy Andrew Sullivan went for delf this weekend. You've probably already seen the new set-up. If you haven't, go visit. If you like what you see, go subscribe. I really mean that. It strikes me as only right that if we enjoy something we should show our appreciation. I'm going on five years blogging now. I basically learned the form from Matt Yglesias and Sullivan. Moreover, I suspect a good many of you came here through Sullivan links, and even a few of you may have come in those early days when I was lucky to be guest-blogging for Matt.
Anyway I've been thinking a lot about how the form is evolving. In my own house, I feel like this is less and less blog, and more and more something between a salon and skull practice. A third of the posting I do (like the one below) is to give you guys room to riff, the other third is just me thinking out a loud, and the last third is somewhere in between. I think we have a problem here between form and function. I have to say, though the changes are small, Andrew's new spot looks a lot more like what he actually does. I especially like the "Recent Threads" bar with along with his "Recent Keepers" (an older feature) allow him to keep conversation going across time. We tend to lose that over here -- especially with out book discussions.
As you might imagine, I hope he's fabulously successful. I find Andrew to be maddening sometimes. But I always find him to be sincere. I still miss him among our "Voices."