The ebook is a unique partnership with the writers and publishers—we want to help celebrate outstanding storytelling, and this is just another way for us to do it. Additionally, money from the ebook sales will be shared with the creators, and we’re excited to have them participating.
Have you considered starting your own website with your ex-Gawker colleagues, perhaps a kinder, gentler Gawker? Wouldn’t a kinder, gentler Gawker be hideously unreadable? No, we never talked about that. It would be hysterical but we haven’t.
AAAAHHHH it is so BEAUTIFUL I just don’t know what to do. The other beautiful thing is to have a child who knows just how much I would love this music (Future Islands, “On The Water”)
The power of Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” (The Awl) derives from the purity of its point of view, which is that of one person’s lived experience, minutely and honestly detailed. Benedikt…
I was without internet for two days, so while I was spinning my wheels a bit, I made a spreadsheet of all the #longreads through 11/21 from their main feed. I wound up choosing some that were not on that list, though.
You’re supposed to choose only five!! very difficult. There’s been so much great writing this year.
Imagine if the Democrats offered Republicans a deficit deal that had more than $3 in tax increases for every $1 in spending cuts, assigned most of those spending cuts to the Pentagon, and didn’t take a dime from Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare beneficiaries. Republicans would laugh at them. But without quite realizing it, that’s the deal Republicans have now offered to the Democrats…In August, Republicans scored what they thought was a big win by persuading Democrats to accept a trigger that consisted only of spending cuts. The price they paid was 1) concentrating the cuts on the Pentagon while exempting Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare beneficiaries, and 2) delaying the cuts until January 1, 2013. That was, they figured, a win, as it eschewed taxes. Grover Norquist’s pledge remained unbroken…But 12 years earlier, George W. Bush had set a trigger of his own. In order to pass his tax cuts using the 51-vote budget reconciliation process, he had agreed to let them sunset in 2010. A last-minute deal extended them until the end of 2012…So now there are two triggers. One is an extremely progressive spending trigger worth $1.2 trillion that goes off on January 1, 2013. The other is an extremely progressive tax trigger worth $3.8 trillion that goes off on…January 1, 2013. If you count reduced interest payments, the two policies alone would reduce future deficits by about $6 trillion. That’s far more than anything the supercommittee came close to discussing. It’s distributed far more progressively than anything the Democrats have even considered proposing. And all that needs to happen for it to pass is, well, nothing.
More from geeky dreamboat Ezra Klein on the Republicans’ dual trigger nightmare here. (via ibad)
This is a lovely little theory that’s been bandied about recently, although it gives me cold comfort to think that the best thing Congress can do for the country at this point is absolutely nothing. But usually the only thing you can trust Congress to do well is somehow delay inevitable situations such as this. So I’ll believe it when I see it.
If Occupy is not going to field any candidates, it would be nice if they could connect the dots for people about getting rid of the worst Congressmen—you have to vote, is the thing!!
About ten years ago I had root canal surgery in the chair at the dentist. Shortly thereafter I was in hospital with the onset of septic shock. It was the worst thing, just about ever. I woke up with bruises on my chest from where the surgeon had had to use his knee to lever my jaw open, which had started to lock.
In any case I tell you this story because a) the dentist, fucking go there before it gets to that point, and b) because the only good thing to pluck from this crucible of horror was this fantastic hallucination I experienced as the anesthesia took hold: I saw myself standing in an enormous, mist-filled green field looking into a tree line. All around me I could hear the envelope of silence, an almost audible sound of silence, which was suddenly broken when a band of horses thundered out of the trees towards me. I felt their wake brush me as they came within inches of my body while I stood there motionless and unafraid. A band of white horses, just like these. Except not from the sea, obviously.
Then they were gone and silence returned until I heard the surgeon say, “bone-stretching.” After that it went back to horrifying, but the horse thing was, I think, the only truly transcendental moment of my life.
Here’s Lapo Elkann—33-y.o. grandson of Gianni Agnelli, “obscenely rich playboy” and product consultant at Ferrari, cover boy of this week’s How to Spend It in this week’s FT—explaining how you can buy a “Tailor Made” custom Ferrari, but only within certain parameters of, erm. Taste. The photographs are utterly boggling.
“The Ferrari of someone’s dreams might cost 200,000 Euro, it might cost six million. […] Upholstery can be cashmere, moquette, stingray, woven metal or suede; […] we can go from cutting edge to jet fighter, from heritage to classic to race—but what it is not about is doing things that are foolish. Ferrari is a brand of humungous worth, it’s a paradise land in which you need to know how to leverage value so as not to tarnish what has already been created. […]”
He also cites Ralph Lauren’s fabled car collection as a source of ideas—and, by the look of one of Elkann’s personal cars, he’s rather inspired by the clothing, too. “This was the first of these to have a completely denim interior, he says proudly, opening the river’s door to a mate white and matte black 599 GB in whch the seats and dashboard are covered in the ubiquitous material, artfully torn and frayed in parts.
I love everything David Roth says ever. So this was the most fun thing. It’s really more about Adam Gopnik and how mad people get about luxury, specifically writing that describes luxury. But there’s a lot of butter in there, as well.
Librarian Melody Layton McMahon of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago assigned her students to read my Wikipedia piece at The Awl, and then they wrote some fantastic things about it here.
!!!
evanfleischer asked: Sorry to hear that. Too much noise -- and weird, warped noise at that -- does not a happy writer make.
Oh no, mon ami. I adore it, is the thing. I go like a Doberman for the thing that’s going to be getting me in trouble. By the bye and speaking of adoring things, your migraine thing was so beautiful and so harrowing. I felt it was almost happening to me as I read, your description was so glitteringly real and good. <3
That thing I wrote about Jon Stewart and Rick Perry at The Awl some days ago had people really shrieking at me a lot, one way and another. It is kind of perverse how attracted to that kind of reaction I am, and also weird because I am such a peaceable and yielding guy in regular life. But I guess am a moth to the flame of rage, because I always want to say, how come you are so mad? I really want to know WHY, is the thing. How can you mend it if you don’t know why?
My friend Richard and I had an interesting conversation about this, in the course of which Richard said you can’t engage with the other side on the death penalty because they simply don’t care if an innocent person is executed now and then. You’re right, they don’t, I said, and that’s why we need to stay the hell away from that argument. Instead you must find arguments that the other side will actually attend to, e.g., it is ridiculously, insanely expensive to have the death penalty compared to not having it. This seems counterintuitive but it’s a fact that you can easily demonstrate, provided you can do it calmly and respectfully. Nobody will listen to you if you’re just screaming. We don’t listen to the Tea Party for this very reason!
Anyway, it is clear as day that progressives hate conservatives so much that they can no longer see straight anymore, because the very idea that we ought to try to figure out WHY conservatives support capital punishment made all these people in such a super rage with me—a harmless scribe! snort—as if I were personally trying to justify or somehow excuse that view. No. Respectful awareness of opposing views is not assent. (I forbore from pointing out that I personally am fiercely opposed to the death penalty because I didn’t want my own views in there at all.) But I do want to know why, because until we learn why we won’t be able to engage meaningfully and intelligently with our opponents. And we have to do that, we really do, no matter how angry and disappointed we are (and we are, I get that completely, indeed I share that.) There’s no alternative.
