July 2, 2013 Listen Henri Cole’s “Self-Portrait with Rifle” By Clare Fentress Abraham Hondius, The Deer Hunt (detail), ca. 1650–95. Henri Cole contributed two poems to our Summer issue, “Self-Portrait with Rifle” and “Free Dirt.” They pair well; both wrestle with the baseness humanity is capable of, and particularly with the surprise we feel when we find such baseness in ourselves. “Self-Portrait with Rifle” illustrates this shock with a jarring scene: a man holding a gun, indignant at his victims—innocent deer—for yielding their lives to his misplaced violence.
July 2, 2013 Look Who Are the Biggest Bookworms in the World? By Sadie Stein This infographic on hours spent reading per week is fascinating.
July 2, 2013 Arts & Culture Bird-watching on Capitol Hill By Casey N. Cep In 1972, Ralph Nader published the book Who Runs Congress? The paperback retailed for $1.95, and was to be the first of several publications by Nader’s Congress Project, a rag-tag group of students, volunteers, and writers. A better title for the book might have been Who Ruins Congress: its pages overflowed with acts of bribery, corruption, and incompetence allegedly committed by members. The Congress Project attempted to investigate every member of Congress, eventually producing extended profiles of every senator and member of the House of Representatives. Many of the profiles ran in local newspapers before the 1972 elections; many of their authors, including James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, and David Ignatius, went on to meaningful careers in political journalism. Along with its publications, the Congress Project lobbied for transparency in the legislative branch. It fought to open Congressional committee meetings to the public and published the committee votes of members. The Congress Project also inspired one of Ralph Nader’s major talking points on the need for citizen activism: Congress, Nader argued, needs to be watched. Millions of Americans pass their time watching birds when they should be watching Congress. Nader hoped to make Congress-watching as popular a pastime as bird-watching. I thought of Nader’s aspirations two weeks ago as I sat in the gallery of the House of Representatives. The House was marching through the final amendments of the Farm Bill, one of the country’s most sweeping pieces of legislation. It regulates everything from farm subsidies and agricultural research to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The Farm Bill comes before Congress every five years, and I wanted to watch the final hours of debate. There’s been a lot of interest in the nitty-gritty details of democracy these days. Millions held their breath as the Supreme Court announced its rulings, glued to CNN and refreshing SCOTUSblog. Thousands watched the Texas Tribune’s live-stream of the epic filibuster by Wendy Davis on the floor of the Texas Senate. While the numbers haven’t quite risen high enough to match the hoards of birders in this country, there’s an increasing desire to witness political history as it happens. Read More
July 2, 2013 On the Shelf The Bible Sizzles, and Other News By Sadie Stein The Bible: soon to be a twelve-volume, two-thousand-page comic book with “sizzling art.” (Not drawn by God.) Toronto mayor and possible crack enthusiast Rob Ford has inspired a whole bunch of real-person fan fic. In surprising news, new research finds that the American under-thirty set is, in fact, more likely to read print than older demos. EdRants is publishing George Eliot’s novella, The Lifted Veil, in its entirety. Picador is turning matchmaker. The publisher will be running a “Love Shack” at the Latitude Festival, in which participants will be paired up based on literary tastes. Oh, and “people signing up to take part will have the chance to win a two-night glamping trip with Suffolk Yurt Holidays,” so…
July 1, 2013 On Film Thomas Crown’s Global Vision By Jason Z. Resnikoff June 19, 2013, marked the forty-fifth anniversary of the release of The Thomas Crown Affair—the original version, directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan Trustman. While for most of us the anniversary of a film might not seem like cause for celebration, I find that birthdays ending in zeros or fives have a momentous quality that welcomes grave rumination. And as we enter blockbuster season, a time of rich and disposable spectacle, it is amazing to revisit this high-gloss 1968 potboiler—what once passed for a summer blockbuster—and discover that not only is it still fresh, but, in the context of some of our most pressing contemporary anxieties, it is disconcertingly prophetic. In short, The Thomas Crown Affair is a paeon to the forces of globalization. In The Thomas Crown Affair, globalization takes the literal form of a blank globe. Whenever I look at this production still—Steve McQueen in business attire resting a proprietary hand on this sphere of power, this atom of capital—I have the same reaction that Ralph Waldo Emerson had when he read Shakespeare: “I actually shade my eyes.” In this photograph, we see a perfect articulation of a deep, ideological commitment to the tenets of globalization: the world reduced to a single, borderless place; a compressed rendering of a new world order. Read More
July 1, 2013 Look This Cat Is Clearly Illiterate By Sadie Stein What makes this so compelling is that the cat is really poring over the text. CORRECTION: The cat’s owner has written in to inform us that not only is Boris literate, he is reading Tennyson!