Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 50
May 6, 2013
Dodged a Bullet
And to think, this could have been me.
Report from a “Catholic Researcher”
This entire thing–from the bio to the headshot to the epigraph to the protest-stunt to the comments–is absolutely priceless. Maybe the purest essay-length distillation of liberal impulse I’ve ever seen.
Update: It’s possible I just carried away. Because here’a another contender: Hey pro-choice friends! Don’t embrace this feminist movie because the director is a known associate of pro-lifers!
Speaking of Coming Out . . .
So I’m reading the letters page on Hawkeye #9, because who doesn’t read the letters page? And it turns out that Jason Collins isn’t the only former Stanford big man to let out a secret about his private life recently!
It turns out that Brook Lopez is a big fan of comic books. Big. Fan.
Draws his own pinups of himself with his favorite characters.
Personally, I think this was pretty brave of him. But it’s possible that the box-office success of Avengers and now Iron Man 3 means that society is ready to embrace his choice genetic destiny lifestyle. So I don’t want to make too much of this. Still, I’ll note that (1) Lopez is an actually active NBA player and (2) it’s not like he got any attaboys direct from the leader of the free world.
May 3, 2013
Trick Question
Byron York goes and plays with the numbers and makes a case that relatively few people have said out loud since November. Here’s the question:
You’re Mitt Romney and it’s October 31, 2012 and a witch comes to you and says, “I can help you win 72 percent of the Hispanic vote or give you an extra 4 points of the white vote.” Which one do you pick?
Looking at the raw politics of the immigration debate, it’s amazing to me that more GOP pros haven’t asked themselves some version of this and then bothered to run the numbers to find out which is best for them.
May 2, 2013
Howard Kurtz and the Daily Beast
I have no special affection for Howard Kurtz nor antipathy toward the Daily Beast—I like them both fine. But the news that Kurtz was fired for making a mistake about Saint Jason Collins struck me as really, really weird. Because for a long while the Beast frequently ran pieces from Scott Horton that turned out to be riddled through and through with errors much more serious that Kurtz’s (absolutely bone-headed) mistake. Horton first came to my attention in 2008 when he was writing about Sarah Palin. Here’s part of what I wrote at the time:
Horton begins with this telling story:
“In June 2007, a cruise liner sponsored by the political journal The Weekly Standard set anchor in Juneau, Alaska. Editors and guests of the publication were then treated to a reception with Governor Sarah Palin. It was a moment of discovery to equal Hernando Cortez’s landing at Veracruz. A writer for London’s Daily Telegraphinterviewed one of the participants in the Juneau junket about the meeting with Palin:
“She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.” Asked if he sees her as a “project,” the former official said: “Your word, not mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment.”
“A key organizer and participant in the Palin meeting was Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who can fairly lay claim to having “discovered” Palin for Washington political circles. Palin’s name appeared in fifty-seven Weekly Standard articles since the Juneau meeting–starting with a paean entitled “The Most Popular Governor” that ran right after the reception.”
While not wanting in any way to diminish the storied influence of my boss, a fact-check is in order here. I was on that fateful Alaska cruise. And it didn’t happen that way. At the most pedantic level, THE WEEKLY STANDARD didn’t “sponsor” a cruise liner. Like many magazines (and other subcultures, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to NASCAR devotees to country music fans), The Weekly Standard hosts an annual cruise. During the trip to Alaska, fewer than 20 percent of the people on the ship were there as cruisers attending the magazine’s seminars.
In any event, shortly before the 2007 cruise to Alaska, Gov. Palin’s office got word that the cruise ship with our editors and guests aboard would be docking in Juneau for a few hours. So they invited Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, and their wives to meet the governor during the brief stop in the capital. The Kristols and Barneses had lunch with the governor and a few members of her staff. There was no “reception.” Neither guests of the magazine nor other members of the magazine staff were present. I should know–I was jealous I wasn’t able to tag along.
As for whether or not the reality of this meeting still counts as “a moment of discovery to equal Hernando Cortez’s landing at Veracruz,” William Boot might have put it that way, so it seems fair to let Horton have some literary license.
Horton, however, quotes a person he claims was present at the “reception” in Juneau, attributing this to a story from the London Telegraph that says no such thing. He can’t have been reading the Telegraph very carefully. The paper mentions THE STANDARD cruise, but quotes no guest from the cruise. The quotes Horton reproduces, the Telegraph attributed to an anonymous staffer from the American Enterprise Institute who is simply talking about Palin. Horton has conflated these two bits to turn the quote into something said by someone who was present at the creation. Another moment Boot would be proud of.
As for THE STANDARD’s supposedly endless pumping of Palin–you bet! But, alas, there have so far been only 41 stories in our pages mentioning Palin, not 57, as Horton says. And the vast majority of them (32 to be precise) ran after Palin was named as McCain’s running mate. Between the “moment of discovery” in Juneau and Palin’s addition to the McCain ticket, the magazine published five items mentioning her. Of those, only one was principally about Palin. It was the story “The Most Popular Governor,” which was written by Fred Barnes.
The Beast eventually ran a correction so thorough that it was tantamount to a retraction. And Horton kept writing for them. Which is fine–that’s their business.
But as always, it’s different rules for different people. Or at least, for different subjects.
May 1, 2013
April 30, 2013
TNG Trivia
Let’s be honest: Neither of us is actually going to sit through the recently-released Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs, no matter how much we want to. We don’t have time and, despite appearances, we still have some dignity.
Fortunately, AICN has done it for us. And they’ve helpfully pulled all the good nuggets from the interviews with TNG writers (including the great Ron Moore, but not, so far as I can tell, the great Jane Espenson).
Of course, if you can name two or more writers from TNG, maybe the dignity hang-up is a stretch.
Just in case you think I’m kidding, snack on this little morsel:
* Patrick Stewart, perhaps envious of William Shatner, apparently told every TNG writer he met that Picard wasn’t “shooting and screwing” enough.
* Berman kept a (posthumous?) bust of Gene Roddenberry in his office that he would blindfold so Roddenberry couldn’t see what Berman and his staff were doing to Roddenberry’s universe.
* Moore’s nickname during season three was “Young Peter Guillam,” the character played by “Into Darkness” star Benedict Cumberbatch in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
* A model of the Enterprise Moore built as a youth was used as a prop in Kirk’s quarters for the movie “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”
Yeah, I’m pretty hot and bothered, too. Enjoy.
Least. Effective. Threat. Ever.
“If Koch Brothers Buy LA Times, Half of Staff May Quit”
Because, you know, the want ads are chock-effing-full of media jobs. Heck, I hear that the Atlantic Monthly–one of the most august publications in America–is desperate for content. Just so long as the writers don’t need to get paid.
But the best part of this headline is the total obliviousness to the fact that if you believe that the Kochs are philanthropic equivalent of Bush-McChimp-Hitler–as the LAT staff seems to–then having half the staff quit–rather than have to be fired or bought out–would be a feature and not a bug, no?
And journalists wonder why people hate them.
The Great Christine Rosen Is BACK
Over at The New Atlantis with a deeply-engaged review of Evgeny Morozov’s The Save Everything Click Here. Her essay is, as you’d expect, a pretty good discussion-starter on Morozov and the world of techno-utopianism. Sample awesome:
In Buddhist philosophy, people are encouraged to embrace discomfort and inconvenience as important aspects of a fully lived life. But most people aren’t Buddhists; they want convenience, and insofar as we are living in a convenience culture, we are actively discouraged from living with limits and instead taught to treat them as simply technical problems to overcome — bumps on the road to glorious efficiency and greater happiness. The technologies we buy to make our lives more convenient inherently discourage conscious reflection about our use of them. As a 2012 advertisement for the iPadput it, “When a screen becomes this good, it’s simply you and the things you care about.”
And:
For his part Morozov embraces “a dynamic view of selfhood as something that emerges only slowly and gradually — both in the context of individual self-development and across generations in the broader historical context,” and he correctly notes that our technologies “actively shape our notion of the self; they even define how and what we think about it.” But apart from politics, he says little about other social and cultural institutions that contribute to the construction of the self, and that also offer havens from the relentless self-exposure that our use of technology demands — havens that will become more important in the future.
This strikes me as (possibly) the heart of most of our discussions about modernity. Both the state and technology are expanding and laying claim to authorities which have historically been the province of the institutions of civil society. Part of that is ideological; part of it is practical. And some institutions of civil society have shriveled on their own while others have been actively crowded out by, for instance, the pervasive, all-devouring “morality” of the free-market.
Rosen is pro-Morozov (albeit with some reservations) but her sense is that Morozov’s critique of techno-utopianism is incomplete in some fundamental ways. But that doesn’t make it any less welcome.
