Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage

"In the white glare of a hot summer’s noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan’s modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf. Three separate protests were under way. Each one represented a slightly different vision of the future that Pakistan might have if—as now seems more likely than ever—Musharraf’s government were to fall."

by William Dalrymple

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I was Michel Foucault's love slave

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier."

by Carol Lloyd

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Good People

They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge of the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. There were bees, and the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark. There had been more storms that week, with some downed trees and the sound of chainsaws all up and down his parents’ street. Their postures on the picnic table were both the same forward kind with their shoulders rounded and elbows on their knees. In this position the girl rocked slightly and once put her face in her hands, but she was not crying. Lane was very still and immobile and looking past the bank at the downed tree in the shallows and its ball of exposed roots going all directions and the tree’s cloud of branches all half in the water. The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright. Looking at the torn-up hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over. It was still early yet and all the shadows wheeling right and shortening. The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love.

By David Foster Wallace

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See also: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway

Go ask Alice

Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I've ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she's become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us -- of me! -- and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

by Farhad Manjoo

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Maturity Was Just Too Messy for Me

"The details of the relationship were as follows: I was 24, saddled with a boring job at a giant food products company outside of Chicago, living at my family's home in an upscale suburb north of the city, saving money for the down payment on a condominium that I would never come to buy. She was 41, a former lawyer, divorced and the mother of three young children, a boy and two girls. As it turned out, she also happened to live in the same suburb as my family, less than five minutes from my home.

We met in an evening class at Northwestern. I knew little about her before asking her out, only that she had terrific black hair and that we'd gone to the same university, though she made it clear when it came up in conversation that she had gone there many, many years before I had.

I knew, too, that there was a sexual résumé I was hoping to build; I had been with the same girlfriend from high school through college and had little experience otherwise.

Several weeks into the course, I sent this woman an e-mail message (I had found her address on the class list), asking her straight out if she would like to have a drink with me.

She didn't respond."

By Peter Levine

Read entire article: MODERN LOVE; Maturity Was Just Too Messy for Me

Parallel Play: A lifetime of restless isolation explained

My second-grade teacher never liked me much, and one assignment I turned in annoyed her so extravagantly that the red pencil with which she scrawled “See me!” broke through the lined paper. Our class had been asked to write about a recent field trip, and, as was so often the case in those days, I had noticed the wrong things:

Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.

by Tim Page

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An Unfinished Symphony

"Catharsis, whilst liberating, is also terribly humbling. I admit to being a stubborn, self-righteous person, traits that are generally laughed at by those close to me, tolerated by those nearby, and reviled by those at a distance. Changing my view of the world, therefore, is a humiliating agony. Publicly changing it on a political subject? Suicide seems easier."

by Nicholas Rowe

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History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

However objectionable the current American administration is – and it is deeply objectionable on a very wide range of issues – the Left should be very careful about becoming, unwittingly, the stalking horse for a would-be rival hegemon. On the eve of World War I, the German General Staff thought it important for Germany that the war be fought against Russia as well as France and Great Britain. Because Russia was the most reactionary and autocratic European Power, the war could then be presented as a war for central European culture against the dark barbarism of Russia. This would guarantee Social Democratic support for the war. This political strategy succeeded – and resulted in a catastrophe. We are very far from a pre-war situation. Nevertheless, the Left should not make the same mistake of supporting a rising counter-hegemon in order to defend civilization against the threat posed by a reactionary power.

by Moishe Postone

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Pearls Before Breakfast

"Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?
Let's find out.

He emerged from the metro at the L'enfant plaza station and positioned himself against a wall behind a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play."

by Gene Weingarten

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See also: A Concert Violinist on the Metro?

Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones

"Among all segments of the audience major misconceptions persist about the 12-tone technique of composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s. Schoenberg’s use of systematized sets of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale — all the keys on the piano from, say, A to G sharp — was a radical departure from tonality, the familiar musical language of major and minor keys."

by Anthony Tommasini

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Stealing Life: The crusader behind "The Wire"

“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”

by Margaret Talbot

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The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

"The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?"

by Mahmood Mamdani

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If I Vanished

Short story about a man, Jack, who, prompted by the memory of a conversation with his girlfriend, Ceil, rents and watches the film, “Open Range.” The story begins with Jack recalling the conversation with Ceil. “What if I were to vanish?” “Vanish?” “Say I met someone else.” “Well, see, that’s…

by Stuart Dybeck

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