"Mr Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical."
Lay It Down, Clowns!
The Beastie Boys on tour in Los Angeles shortly after the release of their debut album, Licensed to Ill.
| Creem | May 1987
Classic piece I actually chose and transcribed for the CREEM anthology published by HarperCollins:
Earlier that evening, after Pee-Wee Herman had visited their dressing room and before they appeared on Joan Rivers’ show, the Beasties were tossing parsley at me, dropping ice cubes in my hair, and “dissin’” (graffiti-artist lingo for “saying bad things about”) my brown socks and flannel shirt. I interpreted all of this to mean that they did not like me.
But I don’t feel alone. Just days before, they’d been evicted from the Sunset Marquis for throwing chairs out their window into the swimming pool. And that week, they’d also become the first group ever to be censored on American Bandstand—Dick Clark, who’d put up with Johnnies Rotten and Lydon in past episodes, apparently determined Adrock’s mid-song crotch-grab was just too much. The Beasties had previously been banned from the Holiday Inn chain after they’d cut a hole in the floor of one suite to serve as a passageway to the one directly below; they’d been banned from CBS Records headquarters after allegedly ripping off a camera at a label party. And MCA brags that he punched aBay Area Music interviewer in the face not too long ago. These guys are total jerks, and they’ve got the fastest-selling debut album in CBS history.
(Source: longform)
Reblogged from longform with 2 notes / Beastie Boys CREEM Long Reads Music True Story
The Sorkin Way
After writing two of the most interesting movies of the past several years (The Social Network and Moneyball), Aaron Sorkin has returned to television via HBO, which is premiering his dramatic series The Newsroom next month. On the set, as a blue-chip cast—including Jeff Daniels, Sam Waterston, Emily Mortimer, and Olivia Munn—revel in (and wrestle with) their dialogue, James Kaplan hears about the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of Sorkin’s fictional world, from his love of screwball to his passion for argument.
(Source: longform)
Reblogged from longform with 7 notes / Aaron Sorkin Television Long Reads
"I thought I was going to throw up. I thought I was going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay."
Pascal Abidor, an American PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at McGill, who was detained and interrogated last year crossing from Montreal to New York because of his choice of academic study and his travels overseas to Jordan and Lebanon. This is your read of the day.
(Source: thepoliticalnotebook)
Reblogged from thepoliticalnotebook with 182 notes / USA Politics Long Reads Homeland Security Islam
5 All-time Great Articles, by Jared B. Keller
tetw:
Jared B. Keller is an associate editor at The Atlantic, and one of the keepers of The Atlantic’s Tumblr. We asked him to choose the 5 articles he finds himself recommending over and over again, and here they are:
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond by Edward Jay Epstein (The Atlantic, 1982) - ”An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and of an inspired, decades-long ad campaign.” This is one of my favorite Atlantic articles of all time. Edward Jay Epstein traces the myth of the rare diamond through the history of De Beers and one of the greatest marketing campaigns ever.
The Behavioral Sink by Will Wiles (Cabinet, 2011) - ”How do you design a utopia?” Will Wiles details John B. Calhoun’s 1972 development of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. In the experiment that would inspire “The Rats of NIHM,” Calhoun followed the grisly, Malthusain rise and fall of the Heaven he built for mice.
Happiness is a Worn Gun by Dan Baum (Harper’s, August 2010) - Many knee-jerk opponents of gun rights have never handled a gun before, so what happens when one liberal wears a concealed weapon? This Harper’s article is is a classic read about Baum’s psychological transformation as a concealed gun owner.
A Matter of Optics by Warren Breckman (Lapham’s Quarterly, “The City,” Fall 2010) - Cities, like schools, prisons, or barracks, are institutions of power and representation. “Rulers of cities have always had an interest in visibility, both in representing their power and in controlling people by seeing them”
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (The Atlantic, 1945) - “In this classic paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.”
Reblogged from tetw with 204 notes / Long Reads Journalism
A history of the terrible rag known as The Daily Mail, Great Britain’s ”most powerful newspaper.” Founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” its print edition reaches four and a half million people per day, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic.
Reblogged from longreads with 14 notes / Long Reads Journalism History Daily Mail
Last Words
Until I hit play on an old-school Walkman last month, I had forgotten that it was possible for my full name to be said with so much love. “This is for Rebecca Jane Hamilton.” My Dad’s words crawled above the whirring of the cassette. It was the first time I’d heard his voice in nearly twenty-five years.
I found the tape, marked “never to be erased,” in New Zealand last year, as I sorted through dusty boxes in Mum’s garage.
“I think it’s a message your Dad tried to leave you,” Mum said, as if stumbling across such a thing were an everyday occurrence.
The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass:
To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.
