October 15, 2013
Ever since the age of seven, I’ve been obsessed with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It took place when I was three, and though I have no memory of hearing the news, the President’s murder, in Dallas, hung over my childhood with the vivid and riveting terror of a dream. On my parents’ bookshelf, there was a slender, crimson-jacketed pictorial account of November 22, 1963—fifty years ago next month—and the days that followed, by the photographers of the Associated Press, called “The Torch Is Passed.” I would sit by myself for what felt like hours and stare at the black-and-white stills—the roses in Jackie’s arms at Love Field; the open Presidential limousine gleaming in the sunlight; the waving, unknowing crowds; Kennedy’s smile in the images just before the first shot; Jackie’s face turning toward him as his fists jerk up to his throat; the black shoe hanging over the back of the seat as the limo speeds away toward the underpass.
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October 14, 2013
Listen to the podcast of “Impeach Obama!,” Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment on the Republican insurrection.
You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or XML.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
October 11, 2013
My colleague John Cassidy wrote not long ago about his difficulties, shared by the fine historian Jerrold Seigel, in finding an apt historical analogue for the Tea Party caucus as it exists today. Nothing quite like it anywhere else, he mused—and then Cassidy won this Francophile heart, at least, by citing as a possible model the Poujadists and Poujadisme, the small shopkeepers’ revolt in France in the nineteen-fifties—a movement that seemed to wither away when de Gaulle came to power, though it’s still alive today in many of the doctrines and practices of the French National Front. (Siegel, being provocative, must have enraged a few others by comparing our shutdown artists to the Islamic Jihad.)
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October 10, 2013
At first, the drowning men and women were mistaken for seagulls. Early Thursday morning, local yachters off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa still had no idea that a ship carrying some five hundred African asylum seekers had just gone down in the water nearby. Hearing high-pitched cries, they looked out to sea to find that the source of the noise wasn’t birds (as they’d first assumed) but Eritrean migrants shouting for help, their bodies thrashing. A large portion were women and children fleeing conflict and poverty by way of Libya, only to be hastily drowning, within eyesight of the Italian shoreline, in the same waters they’d hoped would rescript their lives.
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October 9, 2013
Update: Baby Hope's name is Anjelica Castillo, we learned Saturday, as one of Anjelica's cousins, Conrado Juarez, was arrested. Juarez confessed to sexually abusing and killing her twenty-two years ago, when he was about thirty and Anjelica was four years old.
In the summer of 1993, the detective Jerry Giorgio’s wife, Katherine, bought a small white dress with a sash for a girl who, for two years, had been lying in a New York City morgue. Before that, for as many as ten days in July of 1991, her body had been curled up inside a bright-blue cooler in some shrubbery on the side of the Henry Hudson Parkway, in Manhattan. She may have died in there. It wasn’t a big cooler; she wasn’t a big girl, between three and five years old, the medical examiner decided, and little, because she’d been starved—she weighed less than thirty pounds. She was naked and tied up with cords, and there were signs that she’d been sexually abused. There was plastic wrapped around her, and cans of Coca-Cola had been thrown on top of her, maybe in case someone opened the cooler and looked. Eventually, some construction workers nearby did; they had smelled something, and then they found her.
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October 8, 2013
In case you haven’t kept up, below is a very partial box score of global Islamist violence during the month of September:
Kenya: Militants of the Somali jihadist group Al Shabaab attack the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, slaughtering visitors with grenades and machine guns, separating out some Muslims from non-Muslims, in a killing spree that ends three days later with an assault by the Kenyan military. Death toll: at least sixty men, women, and children, along with several soldiers and militants.
Somalia: Al Shabaab car and suicide bombers blow up the restaurant the Village in Mogadishu for the third time. Death toll: fifteen patrons and staff.
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October 7, 2013
Listen to the podcast of “Washington Dramas,” Margaret Talbot’s Comment on shutting down democracy.
You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or XML.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
October 4, 2013
In September, as House Republicans debated strategies for dealing with the approaching deadlines for funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, the party broke into two camps. The divide was over Obamacare. The most conservative members of the House believed that they should use the threat of a government shutdown to defund the President’s health-care law, even though such a proposal had no chance of passing the Senate, where Democrats had a majority, or of being signed into law by the President.
Meanwhile, John Boehner and Republican congressional leaders, as well as most of the party’s consultant class, favored a merely symbolic fight against Obamacare—there have been dozens already—followed by quick passage of a continuing resolution to fund the government and a pivot to the battle over the debt ceiling.
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October 3, 2013
Last week, in Stockholm, a group of scientists from around the world issued what should be, but of course will not be, the last word on climate change. Officially known as Working Group I’s contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the document offered a veritable flood of information—two thousand two hundred and sixteen pages’ worth. Many groups posted good summaries of the report’s central points, including Climate Central and RealClimate. But perhaps the best one I read came in an e-mail from a biologist who studies the effects of climate change in the Andes. “Spoiler alert,” he wrote. “Earth is getting warmer.”
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October 2, 2013
Two more thoughts about gun control: one practical and immediate, the other more abstract and academic, though with a practical fork in its tail. The practical comes from a recent discussion with my father, about, of all things, shooting raccoons. The Gopnik family seat, such as it is, is nowhere near Manhattan, Upper West or East Side, but rather a farm in remote rural Ontario, where my parents live surrounded by crops, animals, and pests—and indeed by farmers who need and use rifles. When I was talking to my father there last weekend, we discussed a recent raccoon infestation, and how he had called on a neighbor with a rifle to hightail it over to shoot the five unfortunate masked marauders beneath the back porch. (My dad buried them afterward, further proof that English professors can be eminently practical people.) My dad is actually a pretty good shot, and could have done it himself—but he had not finished the paperwork for his gun.
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