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Wasn’t supposed to happen
From an anonymous student, in the NYT: It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Until last week, Mr. Moussavi was a nondescript, if competent, politician — as one of his campaign advisers put it to me, he was meant only to be an instrument for making Iran a tiny bit better, nothing more. Iranians knew…
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Why burn the meals on wheels?
Berlin is a safe city, by American standards. I’ve never felt particularly threatened here; even Kotbusser Tor, the corner/U-bahn station that until recently served as the city’s recognized open-air drug market, never felt anything like as threatening as walking in various streets in San Francisco late at night. Race violence is an issue in some…
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Watching Iran
A road to Damascus moment for me with Twitter this morning. Obsessed with watching the protests and post-stolen-election ripples in Iran, I found my way to #IranElection, and realized how much more information, direct from people on the ground, was there. It’s ongoing now, if slowing down. It’s modern, unfiltered news, which means rumors and…
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Time to breathe again
All is most definitely not right with the world. But some things have been turned right-side-up again, for the first time in a long while.
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Problems from the right
The first time I saw a new-Nazi march here, right past our window on Bornholmer, it was more amusing than appalling. There were maybe 30 people involved, more than half evidently from out of town, surrounded by hundreds of police and probably thousands of protestors. Before it happened, locals distributed flyers asking people along the…
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New look at old sculptures
I worried when I first heard of the Egyptian Museum’s curatorial mash-up, sprinkling Alberto Giacometti sculptures into the ancient collection. A modernist and the ancients — potentially interesting, I thought, like seeing Picasso’s work next to the African art he drew on, but plenty of room for over-curated fluff. We stopped by today. I shouldn’t…
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“Crowdfunding” journalism? Kind of sounds familiar…
Here’s the latest buzzy idea for saving journalsm: Be Obama. Crowdfunding, as described here is essentially allowing (hopefully) large numbers of people to contribute small amounts of money to fund journalistic endeavors. Spot.us, for example, posts lists of potential stories, lets freelancers sign up (or contribute their own ideas), and then lets people donate money…
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Silver lining on CA’s disgraceful same-sex marriage vote
Maybe the single serious bleak spot on Tuesday’s brilliant electoral map was the success of Prop. 8 in California, amending the state’s constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage. Funded by millions of dollars from the conservative Christians who nearly took over state politics in the early 1990s, by deep Mormon pockets, and with a fear-driven campaign…
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A beautiful moment
People can debate the semantics of landslides all they want. This is undeniably one of the great moments in American political history, and Obama one of its great figures. It is encouraging, even inspiring, that an American political system showing such tattered edges over recent cycles can lead to this. A majority of the country…
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The 72 Transformations of Obama Sun Wukong
The real reason Obama is winning (from Politico): The Illinois senator admitted in June to carrying a pocket full of charms. He dug his hand into his pants pocket in the middle of an event and revealed what look like a junk drawer of goodies: a “lucky poker chip” given to him by a voter,…
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Latte-sipping liberals in my latte
Seen at Bonanza Coffee Heroes, where they make a rich, flavorful brew with geopolitical relevance. Americans: If you haven’t voted already, send that ballot in now! (Cross-posted at Hungry in Berlin.)
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From idiots, according to their mouths
Drudge linked this interview, so half the world will see it. But it’s so embarrassing to the profession of journalism I can’t let it pass. A local ABC affiliate in Orlando, FL., got an interview with Biden, and apparently decided they would ask him the “hard” questions, instead of the usual softballs. Which, good thinking.…
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Is John Adams a terrorist suspect?
Ok. I’m the first to admit I didn’t particularly like Doctor Atomic. We saw the opening of John Adams’ latest opera in SF, and my personal feeling was that it was interesting, but it didn’t work. As the story goes, the librettist quit, and Adams and director Peter Sellars instead assembled a libretto from original…
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That poor girl
A brilliant encapsulation of Ireland’s rise to fortune, and subsequent, ongoing collapse, by novelist John Banville (who is a fascinating and lyrical writer, and well worth reading): IN the ravening years of the Celtic Tiger we had a dinner-party competition to define the figure most representative of the suddenly prosperous Ireland we so bafflingly found…
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Collapse. Best time for a vacation.
So, the U.S. House has discarded the plan to save the U.S., and really by some extension, the world economy. The markets have collapsed. It was never an ideal plan in the first place. The insane right wanted changes that had nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with Bizzaro World ideology. So…