September 6, 2013
Whether or not you’re rushing off to the coast to enjoy one of the last beach-appropriate weekends of the year, you’ll have good company with two recent longform pieces in which maritime adventures figure prominently. The first is Kent Russell’s story, in The New Republic, about a former millionaire and Australian named Dave Glasheen who has been living alone on an island for almost twenty years. He initially moved there to start a high-end resort, but the project fell through, his girlfriend left him, and, despite initial protests from the owners of the island and its native inhabitants, Glasheen stayed on. The story sounds like a setup for an idyllic tale of man living close to nature and finding his true self apart from society, but the reality that Russell finds when he visits Glasheen undermines our Robinson Crusoe myths as much as it fulfills them.
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September 6, 2013
Last Wednesday, news broke that Hugo Barra, the vice president of Android product management for Google, would be joining a Chinese phone maker, Xiaomi, to spearhead the company’s international expansion. Hiring the American-educated, Portuguese-speaking Barra, one of the public faces of Google’s incredibly successful mobile operating system, which is now running on over a billion devices, was a significant achievement for the Beijing-based startup. But it was not the three-year-old company’s first victory over a Western technology giant. Though little known outside China, Xiaomi has already managed to outsell Apple in the world’s largest phone market, earning a valuation of over ten billion dollars.
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September 6, 2013
What would it cost Barack Obama if Congress votes against taking military action in Syria? The latest counts suggest that it is a real possibility, and not one that the President can dismiss as blind Republican recalcitrance: he doesn’t have his own party behind him, either. “I knew this was going to be a heavy lift,” Obama told reporters at a press conference, in St. Petersburg, in which he said he would address the U.S. about Syria on Tuesday, and try to bring the public around to his point of view. He said that he knew that Congressmen were hearing from their constituents that they didn’t want to get involved in Syria; he hoped that could be overcome. “It’s—it’s a hard sell, but it’s something I believe in.”
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September 6, 2013
One of the great accomplishments of Martin Buber, the great theologian and philosopher, was to bring traditional eighteenth-century Hasidic tales to the modern reader, collecting them and re-telling them. These are the fervent, allegorical tales of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism; Rabbi Nachman of Breslov; Baruch of Mezbizh; Levi Yitzkhak of Berditchev; and many others. Buber has been criticized for romanticizing Hasidism, for failing to confront what critics see as its obscurantism, but his service to the literature is immense. Also, his scholarly work led to a sublime bit of parody: Woody Allen’s re-telling and parody of those knotty, earthy, enigmatic stories—“Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar”—was engaged with their zaniness and the deadpan tone of interpretation. His piece first appeared in these pages in June, 1970, and then, the next year, in his classic collection, “Getting Even.” Enjoy, and l’shana tova—Happy New Year.
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September 6, 2013
Two years ago, when happenstance delivered a broadcast of Howard Hawks’s 1959 Western, “Rio Bravo,” on Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday, I discussed Hawks’s influence on Godard. Now fortune comes to the rescue again, as the opening of the Howard Hawks retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image coincides with a two-week revival of Godard’s “Contempt,” from 1963, at Film Forum. The coincidence makes perfect sense: “Contempt” is Godard’s most Hawksian film.
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September 6, 2013
President Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for military action in Syria has been applauded by many observers—including, for example, our own Amy Davidson. But in such a complex situation, even what may appear to be the best move is fraught with pitfalls. “I think he’s boxed himself in—left, right, and center—with a set of options that he’s very unhappy with, and rightly so, because they’re bad,” Philip Gourevitch says. The President has yet to provide any convincing arguments for how the U.S. can be effective in stopping the atrocities in Syria, and it’s still not even totally clear what he would do if Congress votes not to intervene. (Deputy national-security adviser Tony Blinken did tell NPR on Friday that Obama has no “intention to use that authority absent Congress backing him,” but the President hasn’t answered that question directly himself.) Gourevitch and John Cassidy join host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss how we got to the brink of intervention and what other options might still be available to the President.
“Everything about him and his entire history would suggest that he would much rather be going down the U.N., multilateral route,” Cassidy says. Gourevitch, who has written about the United Nations, agrees, and adds, “There’s a lot that hasn’t been done,” namely leveraging diplomatic pressure against China in order to better negotiate with Russia. “It looks to me like, so far in his Presidency, Obama’s big mistake,” Gourevitch says.
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Photograph by Pete Souza
September 6, 2013
The official jobs figures for August have focussed attention on an issue that labor-market experts have been puzzling over for years: the decline in the proportion of Americans who are working or actively looking for work. Last month, the labor force participation rate dropped to 63.2 per cent, its lowest level in thirty-five years. That’s pretty remarkable, especially for an economy that is supposedly in its fifth year of recovery. (According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Recession, ended in the spring of 2009.)
In the usual scheme of things, many people drop out of the labor force during recessions because jobs are scarce and they lose hope of finding employment. But once the economy picks up, they start sending out résumés, and the participation rate gradually picks up. (For the Labor Department to count someone as being in the labor force, he or she has to have been working or actively looking for work during the month prior to the date of the government’s monthly employment survey.) This recovery is different. In August, 2008, just before Lehman Brothers blew up, the participation rate was 66.1 per cent. Five years later, it’s still almost three percentage points lower than it was then.
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September 6, 2013
When I was in college, I read J. D. Salinger’s “For Esmé—with Love And Squalor” and adored it. I loved the relationship between the lovely, affecting young Esmé and the (eventually) jaded, shell-shocked male narrator. The story made me want to write short stories, but back then I also thought that I was going to become a Jesuit Catholic priest, and that took precedence. Priesthood was my goal in life.
My new memoir, “The Dark Path,” is about how hard I tried—and how hard I failed—to become a priest. Pursuing that path cost me a serious love affair and then, to a large extent, my sanity. I drank way too much and practiced karate until I permanently messed up my hip and leg. I ended up with my faith shot—living in a severe, depressive, insomniac daze, and teaching English at a Vermont boarding school.
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September 6, 2013
In his new book, “Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks,” Keith Houston reveals the stories behind esoteric punctuation marks, from the pilcrow (¶) to the manicule (☞) to the octothorpe, a.k.a. the hashtag. Many of these have their roots in ancient Greece or Rome, and have evolved over time in Medieval religious texts, Renaissance scholarship, and modern printed works (not to mention the Internet). Here, Houston, who lives in Scotland and also runs a Shady Characters blog, tells the origin stories of some of these marks.
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September 6, 2013
Something unheard of has been happening in Moscow in the past seven weeks. Alexey Navalny, an anti-establishment contender for Moscow mayor, has challenged the incumbent, Sergey Sobianin, one of President Putin’s most trusted appointees.
Several miracles were involved in the campaign, which will end on Sunday, when Muscovites elect their mayor for the first time in ten years. (Putin had previously replaced elections of regional leaders with appointments.) The first miracle is that Navalny was able to run at all. A prominent civic activist and anti-corruption crusader, he has long been a target of intimidation and harassment, and he even served a short-term jail term. This summer, he was sentenced to five years on what are broadly seen as fabricated charges and was taken into custody. But then, the next morning, he was granted a tentative sort of freedom—until his appeal is considered—and was allowed to participate in the mayoral race. (I wrote about his sentencing and release at the time.)
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