BY JEFF DEENEY The heartland as detailed by Nick Reding in his new book, Methland, is not your father’s heartland. Stripped of any means of getting ahead by multinational agribusiness conglomerates, many residents of Smalltown, USA are using crystal meth to cope with endless low-wage packing plant shifts and the despair that comes with poverty and social decay. Mexican drug trafficking organizations have capitalized on Big Agriculture’s need for a steady stream of illegal immigrant workers by flooding cornfields with high purity meth made in sprawling superlabs and carried across the border by the same workers who slaughter America’s pigs […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Writer and director Quentin Tarantino discusses his new film, Inglourious Basterds, which blends elements of the spaghetti western with those of World War II films. Tarantino’s other films include Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 We devote the hour to the life and work of Senator Edward Kennedy. Our guests include historians ROBERT DALLEK and JULIAN ZELLIZER. Then, Washington Post political reporter DAN BALZ joins us to talk about the Kennedy’s influence in politics and in the Congress. Hour 2 Vogue has set the standard for fashion and fashion magazines for […]
BOOK REVIEW: Best Friends Forever
BY SYDNEY SCOTT Your name is Addie Downs, you live in your parents’ house in Pleasant Ridge, Illinois, where your days are spent taking care of your troubled brother and your nights are spent looking for Mr. Right on the Internet. It’s the night of your high school reunion and you’ve decided not to relive those horrible moments with people you have no interest in seeing again, specifically your former best friend. But, your planned night-long Food Network marathon is cut short when your former best bud shows up on your doorstep claiming to have killed someone. Thus begins Jennifer […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus. Reid was the lead correspondent for the 2008 Frontline documentary Sick Around […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Writer-director Robert Siegel wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 2008 film The Wrestler; Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comic and actor, starred in CBS’s The King of Queens and provided the voice for Remy, the main character in Pixar’s food romance Ratatouille. Now the two have collaborated on a new film — a drama, not a comedy — called Big Fan, about an obsessive 35-year-old New York Giants fan. Oswalt’s character, Paul, works as a parking-garage attendant, lives with his mom, and finds an outlet for his passion — and a minor kind of celebrity — as a frequent […]
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES: Brand New Nick Cave Novel Set For Publication This Fall
The Death of Bunny Munro is Nick Cave‘s first novel since his critically acclaimed debut, “And the Ass Saw the Angel,” which was first published in 1989. Penguin is releasing a new edition this September to tie in with his new novel. The Death of Bunny Munro will be published in hardcover by Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, on September 8, 2009 (ISBN: 978-0-86547-910-4; $25.00). Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the dream of hope to the lonely housewives of the south coast of England. Set adrift by his wife’s suicide and struggling to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR With the record business decimated by illegal downloading, the live concert represents the ailing music industry’s biggest source of revenue. But as journalist John Seabrook reports in The New Yorker, the live concert business has yet to reconcile two competing sides of its identity. For the world’s leading concert promoter and ticket seller — LiveNation and Ticketmaster, respectively — a concert is a moneymaking venture. For diehard fans of top-grossing touring artists like Bruce Springsteen and U2, it’s a unique experience of “instant cousinship” with other fans (as one pioneering promoter puts it). Meanwhile, Internet scalping on sites […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
[Click image to enlarge] FRESH AIR Economists Paul Krugman and Stuart Butler discuss the way America’s health care system is financed — and how it should be. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, Krugman argues in a July 25 New York Times column that free markets alone cannot fix the health care system. He’s a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and his books include The Conscience of a Liberal, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century and The Return of Depression Economics. A native of Britain, Butler — the vice president […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Century Foundation fellow Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, published in 2006. A former financial journalist for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, Barron’s and Bloomberg, Mahar writes the Healthbeat blog, a Century Foundation project. She has also contributed to Dartmouth Medicine, covering Medicare spending and the possibility of reform. Money-Driven Medicine argues that, over the past century, the history of U.S. health care has been shaped by corporate interests’ gradual encroachment on physician autonomy. According to Mahar, this has produced a system of costly and inefficient competition among […]
BOTTLED WATER: Lies And Propaganda
GOOD: Tappening, the tap-water campaigners, has taken its gloves off and is fighting the bottled-water business the dirty way. Using the old beat-them-at-their-own-game approach, Tappening’s new Start a Lie campaign takes on truth in advertising by allowing you to create your own viral lie about bottled water. Because, as they say, “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.” MORE RELATED: There is so much wrong with bottled water that it’s hard to know where to begin (read Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania, for starters). But let’s start with the fact that bottled water is the most brilliantly marketed product ever […]
Q&A With Carolyn Wyman, Spam Biographer And Author of The Great Philly Cheesesteak Book
BY SYDNEY SCOTT Junk foodie author Carolyn Wyman specializes in books that tell you everything you wanted to know (and then some) about foods of dubious edibility. Her previous books include Spam: A Biography and Jello: A Biography. Her latest book, The Great Philly Cheesesteak Book, tackles the Rocky Balboa of dead cow sammiches. She will be speaking tomorrow night at the Free Library. PHAWKER: First things first, Pat’s or Geno’s? CAROLYN WYMAN: My book is more of a celebration and comprehensive guidebook to the cheesesteak and cheesesteak stands. I do not rate them. So the question to me really […]
MAILBAG: Please Kill Him
“What about Gillian? Didn’t she write HALF THE FUCKING BOOK, you moron. Best, Legs” — Please Kill Me Co-Author Legs McNeil responding to Sydney Scott’s book review in COMMENTS [Legs, you are STILL the punkest! Keep biting the hand that feeds, somebody’s gotta stick it to The Hand. Best. — The Editor. P.S. Write? The whole book is quotes from other people!]
RECONSIDER THIS: Please Kill Me
BY SYDNEY SCOTT So, there I am. It’s 2004, sophomore year of high school, and I’m wearing my black and pink Hot Topic t-shirt, studded belt, and ripped jeans. My favorite bands were Avenged Sevenfold and Good Charlotte and I was trying my best to appear all angst ridden and mad at the world. I pretended to like the Sex Pistols even though I couldn’t really get into them and feigned disinterest in school when in reality I enjoyed it. This is what punk is in the suburbs these days. Imagine how my whole world changed when I picked up […]