Tag: Clippings
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Our First Expatriate President
Pundits on the right and left have described President Barack Obama as having a distant attitude toward the United States – on the right they call it narcissism and hint at secret agendas and question his patriotism, while on the left they wonder darkly whether he might be “too brainy to be president.” I think it is something else. I have never met President Obama, but our lives have converged in unusual ways. Perhaps unpacking my own intense and complex relationship with the United States might shed some light into what might at first seem like an aloof and distant attitude toward our homeland.
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Nobody Wins
PULITZER prizes are better known for honoring American journalism than fiction. Their heft in literary circles is far outweighed by the Nobel prize or MacArthur Fellowship. Yet the Pulitzer remains one of the few literary honours that can substantially increase an author’s sales in America. The Pulitzer prize for fiction last year boosted sales of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” by an order of magnitude. Publishers had been keen on a similar revenue injection this year, in light of disappointing sales and a looming (and costly) anti-trust decision on digital rights.
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Kim Jong-un Contemplates His Failed Launch
The rocket had failed. Kim Jong-un snapped off his the monitor and turned to face his advisors. What could they possibly tell him? This was total failure. Five ashen men in uniform glittered in the gloom. They groveled and made excuses. Kim lifted a hand and batted the air as if to shoo a fly, and the men backed away slowly, heads bowed deeply in shame. He waited for them to leave and left the control room for his private chambers. The hallway smelled of sandalwood and cognac.
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GSAS Superscript – The Other side of Inequality
The widening gap between rich and poor is the central focus of the Occupy movement, and one of the most press- ing issues in the upcoming presidential election. Contrary to how it may feel on the ground, however, the gap is widening not because of spiraling poverty, but because of increas- ing wealth. From 1979 to 2007, the income of the richest 1 percent of American households increased by 224 percent, with the income of the richest .1 percent increasing by 390 percent; conversely, over the same period of time, the bottom 90 percent of Americans experi- enced income growth of 5 percent. This period of growing inequality has challenged sociologists, since many of the traditional barriers to wealth and status such as class, gender and race, have become more permeable. Today’s elite look different from those of the 1960s. What, then, is happening?
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Translit is neither new nor subversive
As a strategy “Translit” is not new. This so-called new genre sounds an awful lot like Moby Dick, minus the throbbing heartbeat of Captain Ahab pursuing his white whale; or the multi-faceted storytelling of a Thousand-and-One Nights. But all novels are a soup of partially digested hanks of literary matter. A typical chapter is a hybrid of drama, description and transcribed speech. And this soupiness is probably the reason why novels have defied easy categorization into genre since they evolved from the golden triad of Greek drama, tragedy and comedy. But it’s certainly fun to try nail it down and coin a new term. What is disturbing about this trumpeting of “Translit,” however, is Coupland’s suggestion that it is an effective strategy for dealing with “interconnectivity across time and space, just as interconnectedness defines the here and now.”
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The Different Dialects of Serial Murder
I do not follow contemporary cinema, but with the Oscars looming, I felt obliged to weigh in on the moving image as I experience it. Since I do not own a television and lack the sophistication and desire to sift through darknets and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks hunting for shows to download, I have resorted to Youtube’s never-ending supply of serial killer documentaries.
