OBIT MAG: A hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, John Brown rode to the gibbet. He wore a black hat, coat, and pants, white socks, and red slippers. Unlike the wrathful, wild-eyed intensity for which he had become famous, Brown’s demeanor was the same as it had been during his trial and imprisonment: unflappably calm, courteous, and even courageous. His composure belied the crimes for which he would forfeit his life: treason, insurrection, and first-degree murder. He walked to the center of the gallows, thanked his jailer for his warmth and hospitality, and waited quietly while his executioners placed a […]
WORTH REPEATING: Rogue Nation
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Palin, as Sam Tanenhaus ably demonstrates in his review of “Going Rogue,” is not a joke candidate. Neither is Cheney. They represent a real populist and authoritarian option for a declining power. In the face of a bewilderingly changing world, they stand for white America, the extension of its power across the globe, the elevation of torture as a core American value, the permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and American occupation of client states like Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent a contempt for addressing climate change, and an indifference to debt – both Palin and Cheney […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR You may recognize these names from recent headlines: Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Stupak and Pitts have become familiar names through the media’s health care overhaul coverage; their abortion funding amendment introduced an 11th-hour twist as the House of Representatives approached a vote on a landmark health care bill. Ensign was the focus of media attention over his affair with a campaign staffer. Just last night, a Nevada man disclosed that he found out about his wife’s affair with the state’s junior senator — his best friend — via a text message. The […]
BOOK REVIEW: Stephen King’s Under The Dome
BY PAUL MAHER JR. When I was just a kid in Lowell, Massachusetts during the 1970s, I went into a Pawtucketville pet store and saw this 10-gallon fish tank set among cages of rabbits and guinea pigs. Scurrying through the wood shavings were over five dozen albino feeder mice fighting for space. Some of them were running relentlessly on a squeaking tin wheel. Others clung to a dripping water bottle trying to escape the madness below. Their little pink tales draped across an encrusted food bowl spoiled by urine and feces. Most glaringly, in the corner of the tank, three […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Private equity firms buy undervalued or under-appreciated companies, impose short-term improvements and sell them for a fast profit. Some of the companies they’ve bought include Hertz, La Quinta, Dunkin Donuts, and Toys R Us. Josh Kosman, a private equity expert, says that the way the firms have been able to buy these businesses — through leveraged buyouts — means the majority of the money for the buyout has come from loans that the firms dump on the company they’re supposedly fixing. Now burdened with debt, many of those companies owned by private equity firms are in danger of […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR As an American journalist in Japan, Jake Adelstein uncovered a world unknown to many of the Japanese public, let alone to foreigners: the world of organized crime. For 12 years, he investigated for Japan’s largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shinbun. In his final story, Adelstein went toe-to-toe with one of the country’s most notorious crime bosses, a discovery that led to death threats for him and his family — death threats that have yet to be lifted. His new memoir about his experiences is called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. After leaving the […]
BOOKS: Writing For Your Life
BY DAVE ALLEN When does a quirk turn into something more? Writer A.J. Jacobs has turned what seems like a quirk — overhauling his life in sometimes-simple, sometimes-radical ways and cataloging the impact at length in books and for Esquire — into a genre. Quirk is the baseline for Jacobs’ life — he works at a fashionable men’s magazine, but largely forsakes fashion for comfort and claims to own only one suit; he’s an obsessive-compulsive germaphobe living in New York City, where personal space and public hygiene are scarce — but with each experiment, he seems to take his fish-out-of-water […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR As manager of President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, David Plouffe stayed behind the scenes. Now, 10 months after Obama took office, Plouffe has written a memoir about the campaign, detailing the victory and the ways it changed the concept of campaigning. From the indecision surrounding Obama’s choice to run, to the Iowa caucus win, and through the final stages of the general election campaign against John McCain, Plouffe helped guide the campaign to a historic victory. His book offers an insider’s tale of a campaign that managed to harness — perhaps for the first time — the expansive […]
BOOKS: Vampire State Building
Otto Penzler is a well-known editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives. Located in Tribeca, The Mysterious Bookshop is one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstores in America. Penzler is the author of 101 Greatest Movies of Mystery and Suspense (2000). For the New York Sun, he wrote The Crime Scene, a popular weekly mystery fiction column that ran for several years. He has worked with several outstanding authors including Elmore Leonard, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Crais, […]
BOOKS: Atlas Mugged
BY SAINT JOHN BARNED-SMITH FOR OBIT.COM During her life, Ayn Rand created a shrouded, larger-than-life myth about herself. She credited only Aristotle as an inspiration for her beliefs and insisted that her philosophy, Objectivism – which conceived of man “as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute” – was a wholly original system. (Never mind that she read Nietzsche along with other philosophers and political theorists.) Ayn Rand changed her name (Alisa Rosenbaum) and home. The novelist and philosopher had […]
Asterix & Obelisk Turn 50, Still Kicking Roman Ass
TIME: For 50 years, the small but cunning warrior Asterix and his podgy stonemason pal Obelix have been battling the armies of Julius Caesar in their remote village on the Brittany coast — the only part of ancient Gaul never conquered by the Romans. The latest episode in the pair’s comic-strip adventures will be released in France on Thursday to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first Asterix story, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo for the magazine Pilote in 1959. The highly anticipated new book, The Birthday of Asterix and Obelix, is the 34th in […]
BOOKS: Q&A With Author Ali Eteraz
BY PHILLYGRRL Twenty-eight year old Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan was hardly in bookstores a week before the November issue of Opraha’s O Magazine featured it on its fall reading list. But before he was a published author, Eteraz was a Philadelphian, writing in cafés around the city, albeit one with a reputation for a now-inactive, popular reformist Muslim blog. And now Eteraz has come back to Philadelphia for a reading from his book at the Free Library tomorrow night. In the book, Eteraz narrates his transformation from a young boy attending a madrassa in Pakistan […]
SHERIFF: Charges Pending In Balloon Boy Saga
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The sheriff of Larimer County, Colo., said late Saturday that charges will be filed in the case of the 6-year-old boy who vanished into the rafters of his garage for five hours while the world thought he was zooming through the sky in a flying-saucer-like helium balloon. The boy’s father, Richard Heene, met with sheriff’s officials earlier in the day amid lingering questions about whether he perpetrated a hoax. Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden didn’t say Saturday night what the charges would be, but he did say the parents, Richard and his wife, Mayumi Heene, aren’t under arrest. […]