Defending Trayvon Martin

There are obviously, at this stage, two potentially-conflicting accounts of what occurred prior to Martin's death — Zimmerman's being unflattering to the late 17 year-old. Think Progress writer Judd Legum dismisses what he sees as a smear campaign against the child:

Ultimately, whether Martin was a perfect person is irrelevant to whether Zimmerman’s conduct that night was justified. Clearly, there are two different versions of the events that transpired on February 26, the night Trayvon was killed. There are conflicting statements by witnesses and conflicting evidence as to who was the aggressor. Zimmerman has the right to tell his side of the story. But his opportunity to do this will come in a court of law after he is charged and arrested. In the meantime, Zimmerman’s supporters should stop trying to smear the reputation of a dead, 17-year-old boy.

(Image: "Sen. Kevin Parker, D-Brooklyn, left, Sen. Bill Perkins, D-New York, center, and Sen. Eric Adams, D-Brooklyn, wear hooded sweatshirts during session in the Senate Chamber in Albany, N.Y., on Monday, March 26, 2012. The senators wore the sweatshirts to protest the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer." Mike Groll / AP, via Greenwich Time)

The revolution will not be tweeted

In his New York Times column (consider this your warning, fellow non-subscribers), David Carr considers the limits of so-called hashtag activism. Personally, I have a subtle preference for the internet's homegrown neologism, slacktivism. Money quote:

In the friction-free atmosphere of the Internet, it costs nothing more than a flick of the mouse to register concern about the casualties of far-flung conflicts. Certainly some people are taking up the causes that come out of the Web’s fire hose, but others are most likely doing no more than burnishing their digital avatars.

You probably needn't be furnished with examples of this sort of digital cause sympathizing. Charming but frightfully over-earnest youngsters align themselves with all manner of causes online. And why wouldn't they when the energy or time expenditure is that of only a mouse click. The currency of a click is pretty meagre, though, and as a result the central idea of protest, the idea of inconveniencing oneself, is largely lost on my generation. At the website of The Atlantic, Max Fisher links the love-to-hate relationship we have with the recent Kony 2012 campaign to the apparent change in American self-conceptions over the past decade. If this sentence already leaves you thinking the young Mr. Fisher has read too much into the misguided attempt to bring down a Ugandan warlord via tweet, wait until you scan the following:

We often take it for granted that American leadership is a good thing, and this has led us to some of our most destructive and misguided mistakes. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2012 Kony campaign are, in this way, not so different. Of course Iraqis want to come under the stewardship of benevolent American leadership; of course Ugandans want to be saved by the stewardship of benevolent American NGO workers. We envision the American cavalry riding in to save the day, as it truly did in both world wars and maybe in the Cold War, and we like what we see. Part of this really is benevolence, or at least the intent of benevolence. Part of it is self-aggrandizement. But it's an idea that Americans, after nearly a century of faith in the benevolence of American hegemony, seem to be questioning.

A wee bit much? I think so. (The title for this post is taken — stolen, if you will — from Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the limits of Twitter protesting. It's worth reading.)

Desirous of meaning

But in any case unable to find it:

Nietzsche felt that man desired meaning but that religion could no longer meet his need for it. This gave a certain type of person the opportunity to create his own meaning; to become the ubermensch. Now this is can certainly lead down some dark, undemocratic paths. But what I’ve taken out of this is that the responsibility for my own meaning lies with me. It is both terrifying and liberating. That’s a lot of responsibility–if I’m unhappy with my life, my life’s work, or my station, I have only myself to blame. But conversely, it is freeing. I can do anything I want–what I accomplish is only limited by me. An instructor of mine told me that this feeling is not one of picking off a menu, but rather writing the menu yourself. Liberating responsibility indeed.

On the death of Trayvon Martin

Contrast if you will Obama's comments on the tragedy with those of Fox News's Geraldo Riviera, who drew typically dubious conclusions on the significance of adolescent sartorial tastes:

“When you see a kid walking down the street, particularly a dark skinned kid like my son Cruz who I constantly yelled at when he was going out wearing a damn hoodie or those pants around his ankles,” Rivera said. “Take that hood off. People look at you and what’s the instant identification? What’s the instant association? Its crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone stick up a 7-Eleven, the kid is wearing a hoodie. Every time you see a mugging on a surveillance camera or get the old lady in the alcove, it’s the kid with a hoodie. You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangsta — you’re going to be a gangsta wannabe? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That’s what happens. It is an instant reflexive action.”

I feel remotely dirty giving Riviera's comments airtime on your monitors, and suppose I really ought to apologize for subjecting you to them. The money quote from the segment? "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was."

Siskel and Ebert, the original frenemies

In an excerpt from Josh Schollmeyer's oral history in The Chicagoan, Rick Kogan explores the rival movie critics' complex relationship:

They were like a couple of fucking cartoon characters. If you drew them, you couldn’t quite do the real thing justice—especially in the early days with those 1970s clothes. They didn’t look alike, they didn’t sound alike, and they didn’t think alike. They both had a much different delivery—Roger more contemplative and Gene kind of pushy. Plus, Gene was so much more palpably opinionated than Roger. Roger seemed to offer an opinion; Gene jammed his opinion down your throat.

This 2010 Esquire profile of Ebert is worth reading, incase you're interested. (Image: Roger Ebert, right, with the late Gene Siskel, source.)

Is psychoanalysis a science?

John Gray reviews The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani. Upon reflection, one is led to the conclusion that it never quite became the scientific field he wanted it to be:

Where Freud is distinctive is in the way that his thinking departed from the scientific model he thought psychoanalysis should emulate. Partly because human interactions are not repeatable in the way experiments in the natural sciences can be repeated, the practice of psychoanalysis is hard to square with standard versions of scientific method. Rather than being a disability peculiar to psychoanalysis this difficulty is a feature of the social studies in general, and invites the question of whether all branches of knowledge are to be judged by the standards that apply in natural science. 

Pat Robertson's delusion

Due to my blogging hiatus, this arrives on your laptops a little late, but it's worth watching anyway. I was transfixed with a sort of morbid fascination:



Robertson has, in the tradition of other mindless frauds like Falwell, proven himself to be a total schmuck in response to natural disasters. The choice of one example was hard, but I think this seems to demonstrate his logic:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know -- Napoleon the Third or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you, if you'll get us free from the French.' It's a true story. And so the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out -- the Haitians revolted and got themselves free -- but ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

To the boring question regarding bad things inflicted on good people, people are rarely willing offer the simple truth (without getting into the science of it), which is that we live on planet in which such things happen. But if we are willing to blindly embrace the doctrine that we live in a world supervised by a designer, it becomes understandably difficult to maintain the falsehood that such a god is in anyway benign, much less loving. They're not willing to surrender the idea that this deity has a vested interest in our wellbeing, and are then forced to place blame upon the people who built their homes right in the path of God's divine tornado. The absurdity in this proposition need not be elucidated. That said, logical invalidity is lesser in the view of classical Greeks, whose gods were seen as spitefully capricious and indifferent. Any other view simply doesn't conform with reality.

What have we done to Hemingway?

We're left to wonder what Ernest Hemingway would make of our modern image of Ernest Hemingway. The distance between the two entities is hard to ignore:

Those who knew Hemingway well, especially in these early years, reported that his braggadocio was something of a cover: Far from being the swaggering, insouciant rake of lore, he was emotionally fragile, stirred into panics by women’s rejections, prone to insomnia, workaholic and perfectionist (in Paris, he’d spend all day writing and sometimes come home with a single sentence), and given to weird and compulsive record-keeping projects, like tallying exact word counts or tracking his wife’s menstrual rhythms. He was what we would now call a neurotic, and the struggle to make sense of a life suddenly coming apart gave his work the urgency and contours earlier efforts had lacked.

Life within a North Korean prison camp

Blaine Harden retells the harrowing story of Shin In Geun, the son of a political enemy born into a prison camp who, in a remarkable turn of fortune, escaped from an institution the North Korean government still refuses to admit exists:

One day in June 1989, Shin's teacher, a guard who wore a uniform and a pistol on his hip, sprang a surprise search of the six-year-olds. When it was over, he held five kernels of corn. They all belonged to a slight girl Shin remembers as exceptionally pretty. The teacher ordered the girl to the front of the class and told her to kneel. Swinging his wooden pointer, he struck her on the head again and again. As Shin and his classmates watched in silence, lumps puffed up on her skull, blood leaked from her nose and she toppled over on to the concrete floor. Shin and his classmates carried her home. Later that night, she died.

(Video: "Amnesty International has published satellite imagery and new testimony that shed light on the horrific conditions in North Korea's network of political prison camps, which hold an estimated 200,000 people. The images reveal the location, size and conditions inside the camps. Amnesty International spoke to a number of people, including former inmates from the political prison camp at Yodok as well as guards in other political prison camps, to obtain information about life in the camps.")

Night owls

A short history of the nightlife:

Between the 1500s and the late 1700s, the English elite shifted its meal and sleep times by a stretch of seven hours. In the 1500s, the ritualized entertainments at the French court (jousts and tournaments) were held in daylight; by the 1700s, the major events (ballets de cour, operas, balls, masquerades, fireworks displays) were held at night. In the 1500s, Parisian night was defined by curfew and silence; by the 1690s, many Parisian cafés stayed open until dawn. Bedtime in the 1700s for “persons of quality”—a significant minority of the educated and well-off—was three or four in the morning. This change fundamentally altered the rhythm of everyday life and engendered a new pattern of sleeping. The traditional night had (surprisingly) been divided into two periods of slumber, but now it gave way to a single, compressed period of sleep. Going late to bed also transformed the European mentality.

It's almost worth reading for the bits on New Zealand.

Jonathan Franzen hates...

A lot of things. And one of them, apparently, is Twitter, which Franzen took the opportunity to bemoan at an event in Tulane last night. He is said to have told his audience:

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium … People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.

(Twitter devotees may find the following sentence rather difficult to read.) He's actually correct. Twitter has a propensity — depending, of course, on the people whom one follows — to be irritating beyond expression. Not long after the semi-luddite Franzen made his comments, a Twitter hashtag had already been coined. And as David Haglund rightly posits, the meme itself proves the internet's antagonist right:

I use Twitter, and I enjoy it, but it genuinely is hard to "cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters." Yes, the connectivity it helps to provide seems to have aided some truly important political movements, so I would never say that it "stands for everything I oppose." But when I see its fans tweet something like this [tweet pictured], I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don't think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don't intend to choose sides. But if people start making teams, I know which one I would rather be on.

We've posted about Franzen before, incase you're wondering.

"This is not a game"

Obama takes on his critics, those itching to go to war with Iran, urging them to take a more diplomatic approach:



Time is needed for sanctions and acts of diplomacy to take full effect, and in spite of the need for in these matters, it is time Obama and the United States has. Chait was impressed:

Obama’s challenge is essentially to use his advantage as sitting president to bolster his standing to make the more dovish argument. His news conference offered the most crystallized version of what is likely to be his foreign-policy argument through the election. Obama repeatedly dismissed Republican attacks as bellicose political rhetoric. He argued that the demands he do more to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon generally dissolve, upon inspection, into endorsements of policies he is implementing, like sanctions and using the threat of an attack as leverage.

For the love of gossip

Oscar Wilde, in one of many witty demonstrations of brilliance, writes in The Picture of Dorian Gray, "It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true." Laura Moser on the amusement we derive from gossip:

[G]ossip is fun, one of the most profound and satisfying pleasures we humans are given. If Eleanor Roosevelt was right that “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people,” then count me among the 99 percent. I don’t even care if I’m unacquainted with the parties being dissected; if anything, total strangers make a purer sport of the conversation. I experience a similar frisson reading a Dear Prudence column as learning that my childhood dentist was once arrested as a Peeping Tom (fact!).

The whole thing is worth reading even simply for the last line, which I think you'll find rather memorable.

Will evangelicals vote for Romney?

Ryan Lizza considers his history:

Romney has been running for President for six years, and yet his share of the evangelical vote has declined in most states, compared with his showing in 2008. It dropped by ten points in Iowa, eight points in South Carolina, seventeen points in Florida, ten points in Arizona, and five points in Michigan. In New Hampshire, there was modest improvement (one point), and in the low-attendance contest in Nevada, some significant improvement (eight points). Evangelicals are a crucial segment of the G.O.P. Roughly a quarter to a third of the United States population is evangelical, and seventy per cent of these voters identify as Republicans. Other G.O.P. nominees have lost evangelicals to more socially conservative candidates in early primary and caucus states, but this group has always rallied to the presumptive nominee in later stages. A major question for Romney is whether that process begins today or whether he will continue to limp toward the convention without consolidating support among all factions of the party.

Or, for that matter, whether or not he'll become a candidate behind whom voters can throw their support. While you might disagree with Obama's policies profoundly, one cannot deny that even the insipid slogans have had their effect on the public. The president remains inspirational. Mitt Romney is without style, he lacks grace, and his smoothness appears more slimy than clean. Nobody's worshipping this guy, and it would impossible to dismiss this lack of inspirational qualities as a small problem. A candidate is a product.

(Justin Sullivan/Getty, via Esquire)

Quote of the Day

"There are still some terrific people out there doing the business. Marie Colvin was not the only one. Bill Neely of ITN is another. But what has happened is that as it has become more dangerous, there has been this tendency to retreat to fortified compounds away from the front line – hotel rooftops, TV station rooftops, building a platform next to a couple of palm trees 20 miles from the action. Then television becomes performing art.

"Yes, it tends to be done by good-looking, crisply dressed young people. But there are folk still out there who continue to do it in the old-fashioned way – Anthony Loyd at The Times is one of the best. Celebrity journalism is a relatively new phenomenon over the last 20 years. I think it’s fairly deplorable, but we live in a celebrity culture." — Martin Bell, a former BBC war reporter.

Citizen journalism meets fairytale

This is surprisingly clever. I'm impressed:



Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger dumped this ad-copy-perfect prose on the newspaper's behind the scenes blog. Why do journalists come across as remotely masturbatory sometimes?

Newt Gingrich, fade away

He's a figure, frankly, of the past:

Newt Gingrich, at the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce breakfast, was nostalgic for Cobb County. He was nostalgic for his days as Congressman and for his time as Speaker. He was nostalgic for Ronald Reagan, of course, but he was also nostalgic for Bill Clinton, whom he portrayed not as an antagonist but almost as a comrade-in-arms, back in those days when they were balancing budgets, reforming welfare, and engaging in sexual congress with their staffers. He was even nostalgic for past Cobb County Chamber of Commerce breakfasts, mentioning one he attended in 1998, before he and Clinton fell from grace, and saying that now, on second thought, he wished he'd begun his presidential campaign here... which made him sound nostalgic for the campaign itself.

Is Mormonism still racist?

First, a short history:

Starting shortly after the death of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844, the Mormon Church began denying its priesthood—otherwise granted to faithful young men over the age of 12 more or less as a matter of course—to men of African descent. That policy survived for well over a century. Only with a divine revelation announced by then-prophet Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 did the church finally overturn the ban and allow “all worthy males,” regardless of race, full and equal membership in the religion.

On the question of whether or not the Church remains inherently racist, that's a little harder to determine. It certainly doesn't look good, though:

Why did the church withhold the priesthood from blacks for over a century? Among the reasons trotted out by church leaders—including church presidents—during that time: Black people are the cursed descendants of ancient Biblical figures; black people committed pre-mortal perfidy; black people lacked the intelligence and personal integrity to hold such a sacred office. Such past beliefs have never officially been repudiated.

Another question often posed regarding Mormonism is whether or not the religion constitutes a cult. Who cares? The sinister beliefs are so strange and perverted, any matter of classification seems a banal formality.

A car crash and Camus

Recent conspiracy theories contend that the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was killed by the K.G.B., due to his vocal and courageous criticism of communism. Historian Robert Zaretsky rebukes the extraordinary claim:

“There is grim philosophical irony in the fact that Albert Camus should have died in a senseless automobile accident,” an article in The New York Times following his death began, “victim of a chance mishap.” But to those Camus left behind, death by car was not exactly senseless. While his contemporaries were turning to religion or ideologies to escape the absurd, they were also turning to, well, cars. Going fast — going too fast — in slim cars with seductive names like Citroën’s “Goddess” seemed to offer a ticket to eternity, and to many onlookers, a high-speed death seemed a sensible, almost poetic, end for the era’s brightest stars.

Help wanted

We're looking to change the site a little bit. Of course, I say we royally. The site is, for all intents and purposes, just me sitting at home on the couch with my laptop, cat, an RSS feed reader, and a number of half-read books. With an almost American sense of optimism and expansion, we (sorry — I) am looking to make the site better and more diverse in terms of the voices and perspectives offered. Hence the search for a interesting writers. If you've an interest in news, ideas, literature, classical Roman agriculture, whatever...I'd be thrilled to hear from you. Lack of experience, of course, doesn't matter, and if anything may improve your chances. (Listen to me; I'm sounding like a human resources department already.)

Anyhow, I'd love to hear from you.

The world must keep pushing

A recent New York Times editorial included this stern message, stating that although Russia and China are beginning to express some level of doubt about their continued diplomatic chumminess with the Syrian dictator, Moscow and Beijing need to do more:

If Russia and China really want to preserve their influence in the region, they need to stop handing the Syrian dictator economic, military and diplomatic lifelines. The only way to repair their reputations is to end their complicity. The only way to end the killing is for Mr. Assad to go. Moscow and Beijing need to use all of their leverage to make that happen.

The United States, Europe, the Arab League and Turkey need to make that case to China and Russia every chance they have. And they need to keep tightening their own sanctions. At some point, the Syrian military and business elites will decide that backing the dictator is a losing proposition. The United States and its allies also need to use all of their influence and coaching to help the opposition form a credible, multiethnic government, one that will respect all Syrians.

News emerging from the conflict has been nothing short of disturbing. After the last month's violent and merciless bombardment by Assad's government, we learn that government forces have taken Homs, leaving the city's brave residents to either flee or be killed at the hands of their own government. A death toll now estimated to be around 7,500 continues to rise because of such developments. The onus is now on Syria's perceived allies in Moscow and Beijing to ensure all support has been withdrawn for this madness. Only then will the bloodshed end.

Sentiment among Western scribes appears to be fixed around the sensible notion that intervention at this stage would be a sign of strategic folly, and I'm personally inclined to agree that it could evolve to become an unnecessary civil war that may spread beyond Syria's borders into an already precarious Middle East. But that doesn't mean that the United States cannot provide assistance to the rebel forces, fighting the Assad government vicariously, and doing what it can diplomatically to bring the violence to an end. There have been incautious but quiet calls from Senators McCain and Graham to provide weapons, intelligence, financial assistance, and other supplies to the rebels. "What is needed urgently are tangible actions by the community of responsible nations to ensure that the Syrian people have the means to protect themselves against their attackers," they wrote, underemphasizing the obvious but crucial fact that the 'attackers' in this case is actually their government.

It's encouraging to see that diplomats are no longer afraid to use the accurate term 'war criminal' to describe Mr. Assad, if a little reluctantly. Anne Applebaum had the following to say about its use:

So far, Western leaders have refrained from this kind of language because, as Hillary Clinton put it this week, using labels like "war criminal" to describe Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, can "limit options to persuade leaders to step down from power." She is right—which is why rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing the regime should be accompanied by immediate and strenuous efforts to not only unify the opposition but also to get its disparate members talking about the post-Assad future. In particular, the Syrian rebels need to start talking about transitional justice: how, exactly, former regime allies will be treated; how real criminals will be distinguished from mere collaborators; how victims will be compensated; and how the minority rule of a dictatorial clan can be ended without bloodshed.

However, this might be looking forward a trifle too soon. Even the most incurious follower of foreign-policy might have cause to ask when and in what form such assistance will be offered. The Times editorial ended on a firm and assured note: "Mr. Assad must go. And the world must keep pushing until he does." My thoughts exactly.

Meet the Breitbart Truthers

Some people will always prefer a conspiracy theory:

Most Breitbart trutherism springs from one source -- Breitbart's speech at CPAC last month, in which he claimed ownership of anti-Obama dynamite. "We've got videos," said Breitbart. "This election, we're going to vet him -- from his college days." The theory, summed up neatly by video titles like "ILLUMINATI ASSASSINATION?," is that the Obama regime took out a critic before he could unleash damaging material.

The Republicans' latest nightmare

James Fenton, with enviable eloquence, recounts the GOP's latest Brokeback Mountain-themed debacle. Another article comes to mind.

Image of the Day

"Tammy Jenkins take time from cleaning up to survey the damage to a strip mall Friday, March 2, 2012, in Harrisburg, Ill. A pre-dawn twister flattened entire blocks of homes Wednesday as violent storms ravaged the Midwest and South, an early-season tornado outbreak killing nearly 30 people. Authorities feared the already ugly death toll would rise as daylight broke on Saturday's search for survivors." (Seth Perlman / AP, via the Houston Chronicle)

Is smartphone monitoring changing what it means to be human?

Or, if not, what it means to monitor ourselves:

Behavioral scientist Betsy Barbeau is one of these digital “neurosurgeons.” As the chief science officer at Healthrageous, the commercial arm that grew out of the Center for Connected Health, she’s designing artificial intelligence technology that will better understand us humans. People who sign up for Healthrageous are guided by a virtual coach that’s been programmed using a technique called motivational interviewing. The goal is to create an empathetic, almost therapeutic relationship between the patient and the technology. “There’s no wagging of the finger, there’s no, ‘You blew it this week,’” Barbeau explains. “It’s the idea that someone is watching you, checking in, and giving you an ‘atta girl’ if you met your goals.” That “someone” is actually a something, but who’s counting? I ask Barbeau what would happen if I lied to the coach about my calorie intake. She laughs. “Well, I could see it saying something like, ‘I see your activity level has been very high but your weight level hasn’t been changing.’ It would be an opener for further reflection.”

Knowingly cultivating an empathetic relationship with your smartphone is downright creepy. But the thing is, virtual coaches actually work. A study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, published in January and coauthored by Kvedar and Timothy Bickmore, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, found that having a virtual coach can steer people toward better health. 

This is fine, provided the users of such apps don't instruct their phones to send their exercise statistics to Facebook or Twitter. That really annoys me — and everyone else, for that matter, who isn't your mother.

And now he's dead: Breitbart edition

I am all too aware that I'm ever so slightly late in reacting to this news, but in this case it needed more time than usual to digest. Initial reactions have been expectedly, if not unfortunately, diplomatic — including my own knee-jerk Twitter response, in which I told my very few followers, "Just found out about the death of Andrew Breitbart. I disagreed with him and his methods in almost every sense, but this is sad all the same." Indeed, this is sad, and it would be impossible for anyone to deny it in the case of this relatively young man, whose wife and children mustn't be forgotten by the outside world in its eulogies, however resentful. My follow-up from a few hours later was more measured on these points: "Okay, let's remember that Breitbart, in spite of his ardent conservatism, was a vocal champion of gay rights. What was less than admirable was his awfully demagogic tendencies. The real tragedy here, assuming there is one, is the age: 43. Too. Young."

Mentioned in the last paragraph is diplomatic side of the in memoriam articles we've been seeing around the web in the time since news hit yesterday. Most reporters carefully marshal their facts, looking to paint a portrait of their subject that is neither dishonest nor entirely forthright, perhaps completely outrageous. I mean not to include in this umbrella description, however, some of the slightly odious tweets one is condemned to stumble across in the hours following such news, or for that matter, Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi's own post on the subject — which was bitterly and perhaps appropriately titled, "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche." Believe me, you'll want to read this one:

Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead. I say this in the nicest possible way. I actually kind of liked Andrew Breitbart. Not in the sense that I would ever have wanted to hang out with him, or even be caught within a hundred yards of him without a Haz-Mat suit on, but I respected the shamelessness. Breitbart didn’t do anything by halves, and even his most ardent detractors had to admit that he had a highly developed, if not always funny, sense of humor.

You may be able to sense that this requires full reading to fully appreciate, and take note of the update Taibbi added to the end of his post. Someone needed to write this: the internet needs a counterweight to the moist, mawkish remembrances that pop up after the death of a controversial figure. Sometimes a douche needs to be called a douche. A journalist wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't itch to satisfy the demand for a little honesty in these matters, and if I may borrow slightly from Voltaire: to the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth. But if some modest advice were to be offered to Taibbi's side in all matters polemical, a writer is likely to be taken more seriously if the argument can't be summed up quite so laconically, and if the summary wasn't made up primarily of a four letter word. It's perfectly acceptable to brand someone a scumbag, even a dead scumbag. But let's make sure we actually have an argument to submit alongside it, okay?

(Image: "Andrew Breitbart speaks at a 'Cut Spending Now' rally at the conservative Americans for Prosperity 'Defending the American Dream Summit.'" Getty Images, via Rolling Stone.)

Writing, now a career

No one, according to Tim Parks, predicted that writing would become any less a vocation and more a career choice:

In the second half of the century the cost of publishing fell considerably, the number of fiction and poetry titles per annum shot up (about forty thousand fiction titles are published in the US each year), profits were squeezed, discounting was savage. A situation was soon reached where a precious few authors sold vast numbers of books while vast numbers of writers sold precious few books. Such however was the now towering and indeed international celebrity of the former that the latter threw themselves even more eagerly into the fray, partly because they needed their declining advances more often, partly in the hope of achieving such celebrity themselves.