Notes

Too Much Information by John Jeremiah Sullivan

After polishing off Pulphead, one can be forgiven for seeking a little more Sullivan, and you can only imagine the gleeful eep! sound my brain made when, after a quick googling, it was discovered that he a) reviewed DFW’s Pale King and b) was as big a howling fantod as you can hope for among the ultragood. (Matched only (and perhaps bested) by Zadie Smith’s long piece at the end of Changing My Mind.) Sullivan on Wallace. Who could ask for anything more?

Here’s a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That’s what Wallace’s suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn’t just a sad thing, it was a blow.

And then, after moving on in to Pale King territory:

He was a writer who in fighting to rise above the noise of his time remained hopelessly of it, susceptible to its voices even while trying to master them. His reality, as he once wrote, had been “MTV’d.” This is why, like no one else, he seems to speak from inside the tornado.

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

The best book of essays I have read. Period. From the NYT Review:

Sullivan seems most interested in that rare cultural nexus where artistry — where something genuinely new, challenging — intersects with commercial popularity. What he writes of one blues scholar could easily be said about Sullivan himself: “He was interested, in other words, in culturally precious things that had been accidentally snagged and preserved by stray cogs of the anarchic capitalist threshing machine.”

The Caging of America by Adam Gopnik

A brief, compelling look at just how bad the American prison system has become.

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Raise the Crime Rate by Christopher Glazek

Where Gopnick (above) gives a survey of what prison reform advocates have been up to recently, Glazek appears to be one himself, and over the course of ten or so pages lays out his scheme in broad strokes, arguing that we should give up on one cause in the interest of bettering our chances of advancing another.

If, in the popular imagination, the primary purpose of prisons is to keep us safe from (the vanishingly small number of) people like Charles Manson, then we should simply kill Charles Manson. Prison abolitionists should be ready to advocate a massive expansion of the death penalty if that’s what it takes to move the discussion forward. A prisonless society where murderers were systematically executed and rapists were automatically castrated wouldn’t be the most humane society imaginable, but it would be light-years ahead of the status quo.

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher

A great summary of just how far behind the bleeding edge of modern industrial production America has fallen. Could you wake up 8,000 American workers in the middle of the night to begin an unannounced 12 hour shift? No. Is that a good thing? Well …

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Why Mitt Romney’s Entitlement-Privatization Plan Is Crazy by Matt Taibbi

Taibbi doing what he does best.

Actually, it makes sense. If we don’t cut health care and retirement benefits for old people, how can we pay for the carried-interest tax break that allows private equity guys like, well, Mitt Romney to keep paying 15 percent tax rates?

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? by Charles McGrath

In June of last year, Stephen Colbert start his own Super PAC equipped with a 501 (c)(4) (which lets him gather as much money as people are willing to give) and he has been using it to expose just what aspects of the American political system can be bought and sold by private interests. Will the South Carolina primary be re-branded the The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary? Well that depends on whether republicans (or democrats) take him up on his offer for $500,000 of “assistance”. In other words : probably.

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell

This one might make you a little sick to your stomach. In just a few brief paragraphs, Marcia Angell distills the message of three recent books that take on America’s obsession with self-medication to reveal that things – specficailly long held practices of diagnosis and prescription –  are not at all what they seem.  Has there actually been a recent (mind-blowingly large) spike in the number of psychologically unstable five year olds? Or has an industry grown so powerful (through such corrupt methods) that it now has the means to fabricate the need for its products?  A great, great read.

Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas by Mike Masnick

A brief list; a peek in to just how tight government control over the internet is about to become.  Read it while you can.