June 2012
13 posts
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Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges on U.S. poverty
Beneath new $1.8 million-dollar surveillance cameras installed to assist the fractured police force in Camden, New Jersey, suburban neighbors flood the city’s popular narcotics market at sixth and York streets, even while the sun shines. The corner marks just one of “perhaps a hundred open air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13,” wrote Pulitzer...
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“In pop culture, poli-sci and sci-fi are commonly used, but ‘poli-fi’ is a term rarely heard. The hybrid genre of political fiction is an underutilized storytelling engine, particularly when the speculative scenarios provoke, entertain, and resonate as strongly as DMZ.”
— Writer and critic Justin Giampaoli in DMZ Volume 12: The Five Nations of New York (Vertigo),...
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Let's super-size our cause marketing efforts
Tom Laskawy at Grist reports that beverage companies will attempt to “demonstrate (their) roles as responsible corporate citizens who do good deeds” by taking on cause marketing efforts in the wake of this modern crackdown on super-sized sodas:
Philadelphia provided a perfect and ridiculously explicit example of this when the American Beverage Association donated $10 million to a...
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“Romney’s aides not only scrubbed all e-mails from a computer server in his...”
– “Nuke ‘Em,” Frank Rich on the power of negative campaigning within American politics, New York
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More than one murder daily →
Philadelphia crime reporter Morgan Zalot (@morganzalot) tallies a horrid seven hours in the city that pushed 2012’s murder rate to more than one daily.
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It's the London Social Degree
In the June 2012 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, writer David Shirley discusses Billy Nicholls’ late-1960s pop psyche debut Would You Believe? and runs down how it came to fruition.
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Reading Ray
When Ray Bradbury saw lions on the big screen during a 1924 Lon Chaney film, he envisioned them at the terrifying center of “The Veldt,” an early tale he authored about an automated home, complete with a room that virtually recreated an African veldt. I was assigned to read “The Veldt” in a grade school books discussion group, and it would stay very close to my heart in the...
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“As the Times reports, the administration is currently limiting its use to the...”
– Harper’s Contributing Editor Scott Horton on the secret targeted-killings list that President Obama reviews in order to personally approve “…every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total,”...
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“Incidentally, a story called “Bright Phoenix” follows Nolan’s interview in that...”
– We rejected the story that became Fahrenheit 451. Damn.
(via @dominicumile)
*Grateful and humbled to see that the folks at The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) were kind enough to share my essay about Ray Bradbury’s work yesterday, and that people are sharing it here and elsewhere. 