NEW YORK TIMES: Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn. The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt. Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn discusses power players of health care reform, including the insurance lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, the American Medical Association and Congress. Cohn is the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price, in which he makes a case for universal health care coverage through a government-regulated, single-payer system. He writes about health care for The New Republic’s blog The Treatment. RADIO TIMES Hour One A behind the scenes look at how the case against Former State Senator Vince Fumo was built […]
THE RELUCTANT COMMUNIST: The Amazing Tragic Life Of A G.I. Imprisoned In North Korea For 40 Years
LOS ANGELES TIMES: In 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam. One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity. Jenkins quickly became the Pyongyang government’s most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated […]
THE TYRANNY OF MINDLESS PLEASURE: George Orwell’s Police State Vs. Aldous Huxley’s Dunce State
[via RECOMBINANT RECORDS] WIKIPEDIA: The book originated with Postman’s delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell’s 1984 where they were oppressed by pain. Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and […]
ON THE INTERNETS: The Astronomical Cost Of Free
The first ever YouTube, starring YouTube co-creator Jawed Karim, is incredibly lame. Nonetheless, it has been viewed 805,990 times. THE TELEGRAPH: Innumerable jaded web entrepreneurs will tell you how easy it is to get thousands of people to glance at a site, but how tortuous it is to get people to stick around or even come back again the following day. Not only do you have to fulfill a desire that people didn’t even realise that they had, but it has to be done with such style and panache that your service becomes indispensable. While the internet may have dismantled […]
ARSTY: Brother From Another Planet
Lecture: John Szwed, Author of Space Is The Place Whenever Wednesday, July 8 @ 7pm FREE at ICA Institute of Contemporary Art · University of Pennsylvania 118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 · 215.898.5911 Hear a lecture by John Szwed, the biographic expert on all things Ra. He is an anthropologist, musicologist and historian who teaches at Columbia University and is the author of Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Da Capo Press, 1998). [Complete listing of upcoming Sun Ra-related events after the jump]
DEAD MAN TALKING: Q&A With Tom Moon, Author Of 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BY JONATHAN VALANIA Full disclosure: Tom Moon got me into the business, hiring me on as a freelance music writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as pop music critic par excellence from 1988 to 2004. During that time he was also a regular contributor to GQ, Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, Esquire and he is currently a music critic for NPR’s All Things Considered. Three and a half years ago he began work on a frighteningly ambitious record buyer’s guide called 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, published by Workman Publishing in late 2008. […]
FOG OF WAR: Robert McNamara Is No More
REUTERS: Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara died on Monday aged 93. He will be remembered most as the leading architect of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara also forged brilliant careers in industry and international finance, but his painful legacy remains Vietnam. More than anyone else except possibly President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara became to anti-war critics the symbol of a failed policy that left more than 58,000 U.S. troops dead and the nation bogged down in a seemingly endless disaster in Southeast Asia. Pundits came to call the conflict “McNamara’s War.” With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he […]
BOOKS: Scream, Dracula, Scream!
BY SYDNEY SCOTT Our obsession with vampires seems to be as deathless as the undead. Images of pasty-faced bloodsucking sophisticates with miles and miles of style epitomize our notions of the vampires thanks to the lurid prose of Bram Stoker and Ann Rice. But with the sudden and, arguably, undeserved success of her ‘tween hit Twilight, Stephanie Meyer has flipped the script for a new generation. I managed to avoid reading the book for a while, but eventually I succumbed to the hype when my old roommate kept urging me to read it. It took me two months to finish […]
INFINITE SUMMER: Let’s All Make Love In Jest
[“Butterfly Suicide II” by DoNotAttempt] BY DAVE ALLEN News of “Infinite Summer,” the just-launched group-read of David Foster Wallace’s massive and masterful tome Infinite Jest in just over three months — or roughly 75 pages a week — spread at a near-viral pace, at least in the literary world. The initiative, sort of an invisible national book club, launched on June 21st with both an official site and Facebook group recruiting “endurance bibliophiles.” If that sounds like you, get a move on because according to the web site: Infinite Summer is 9% complete. I’m not participating, in part because I […]
Q&A: Novelist & Ex-NPR Host Farai Chideya
BY DIANCA POTTS Who says there are no second acts in American Life? (OK, F. Scott Fitzgerald said it, but that doesn’t mean it’s true) Scratch an NPR host and find a budding novelist. In advance of her appearance tonight at the Free Library, we called up former News And Notes host Farai Chideya to discuss just about everything under the sun: Obama, NPR, blogging, goth rock, the state of race relations in America, the Smiths, mixtapes and, most importantly her new book. Chideya is currently on the road in support of her debut novel, Kiss the Sky, which captures […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Bloody protests in the streets of Iran following that nation’s June 12 presidential election have captivated the world’s attention, but what does it all mean? Political analyst Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joins Fresh Air to discuss this unprecedented moment in the country’s political history. Before joining Carnegie, Sadjadpour was the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, based in Tehran and Washington, D.C. A regular contributor to BBC World TV and radio, CNN, National Public Radio and PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Sadjadpour has written for The Washington Post, The New York […]
WEEKEND UPDATE: The Good News Flower Hour
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