The World Cup ended on Sunday, July 11th. Many of us delighted in this tournament not only as inveterate soccer fans, but also as witnesses to a unique event that unified the globe for more than a month. And yet, the potentially divisive forces of nationalism have not vanished. Clearly, in competitions in which teams appear solely based on the commonality of their players’ passports, any and all rooting interests express by definition some kind of nationalism, no matter how muted. The “us” and “we” means ipso facto a nation. This is markedly different in such top-level competitions like the Champions League in Europe and the Copa Libertadores in South America where the “us” and “we” is decidedly non-national and accentuates at the same time the global and the local. Having attended five World Cups since 1966 and experienced all with some degree of knowledge and consciousness since the 1954 tournament in Switzerland, I have witnessed the ever-increasing singing of national anthems by players and fans in the more recent cups.
Indeed, the singing – or not singing – of the anthem by players led to major discussions in their home countries pertaining to the degree of their patriotism and their commitment to playing for their country. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in France where players’ singing of the Marseillaise was judged in terms of its quality, demeanor, projection, and acquaintance with the text as proper measures of their extant national allegiance to France and thus their commitment to play for the national team. Clearly, the volume of the criticisms escalates proportionally to the team’s failures on the field.
This fall brings the major series relaunch of the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, now under the editorship of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and New Yorker Poetry Editor Paul Muldoon. Muldoon sat down with the Princeton Tiger earlier this year for their series “Discussions in Contemporary Poetry,” in which the Princeton professor discussed the profound linguistic styling of Ke$ha’s “Tik, Tok”:
The Huffington Post gives their take on the critique here.
Fortunately, the first book in the series, Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City, combines high (Shakespeare and Walter Benjamin) and not-so-high (Johnny Depp and Target) culture in ways that serious lovers of poetry can really enjoy. Read the full series description here.
Michael Kazin, editor of our pathbreaking new reference book The PRINCETON ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY, did a Q&A with CNN.com today on the intriguing recent survey that uncovered that 86% of Americans think their government is broken. Check out the Q&A here. The good news? 81% of Americans think it can be fixed.
Our friends over at The Rumpus (for those who don’t know, it’s an online magazine taking the pop out of culture and offering insight on what really matters. For the full 411 check it out here!) have posted a hilarious and oh-so-true piece by Ethan Watters on what (not) to do during an author appearance on “The Daily Show.” Seriously, the man is spot on in his assessment.
Having accompanied an author or two in my day to major television interviews, what he says can be applied to pretty much any on-air appearance (except maybe Martha who will not, in fact, make eye contact.) Television is a strange game to play for those used to parking it in front of a computer screen and letting those synapses fire – and it’s even stranger to watch from behind the scenes so just imagine what being on camera is like!
What’s your best advice for our up-and-coming green room guests?
For another take on the shuttered industry publication, read PUP author Susan Wise Bauer’s blog. Click here for her hilarious and oh-so-true post, “Kirkus Closes, Author Yawns.”
Down with snark! Hey, not so fast. Check out this Gawker post on Kirkus and other recent media casualties. And how, pray tell, can a pre pub review be “anodyne” and for whom? Author, reviewer or reader? Discuss.
I admit, I had never heard of The Black List until I read Elizabeth Currid’s article in today’s Los Angeles Times.
So, for those of you not “in the know” either, here’s a quick description from Currid:
Known as the Black List, this annual ranking of the year’s most-talked-about unproduced screenplays has the power to catapult an unknown screenwriter into instant talks with a major studio. That’s how Diablo Cody, writer of “Juno,” got her break.
Currid, who previously examined the importance of cultural sites for economics in The Warhol Economy, looks at the box-office success of past black list scripts. This practical approach is fascinating.
Altogether, 67 Black List scripts from 2005 were turned into movies between 2006 and 2008, and they collectively generated $2.5 billion in U.S. box-office receipts. That figure is equivalent to the total of the top 10 earners in 2008.
Given this track record, why has the Black List achieved such inordinate influence?
Head over to the LA Times web site to read the complete article, and for a sneak preview of this year’s possible black list scripts, visit Indie Movies Online. The official list is circulated only to industry executives, though it almost always slips out into the media.
by Kathryn Rosko | Filed in: Opinions | 3:36pm EST
Christopher Beckwith has recently published a new book on the history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the present titled EMPIRES OF THE SILK ROAD. He recently penned an op-ed on the situation in Urumqi, providing insight into the past and present of the Uighur people. Chinese Repression in Urumqi and World Appeasement [...]
by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Law - Opinions | 9:30am EST
Over at Forbes.com, Christopher Eisgruber has a great piece that looks at the political nature of the Supreme Court appointments process. Eisgruber tells us that “the confirmation process has been political for a long time, and America’s founding generation itself showed how tough, and how ugly, a confirmation fight could get.” A point he demonstrates with the story of George Washington’s nominee John Rutledge–a nomination that was squashed by the Senate for political reasons.
Eisgruber writes, “Presidents have submitted just over 150 Supreme Court nominations to the Senate, and about 80% of the nominees have been confirmed. A closer look at the numbers shows that the odds of confirmation depend on some basic political facts. Not surprisingly, fewer nominees–less than 60%–get confirmed when the president’s party does not control a majority in the Senate. By contrast, when the same party controls the White House and the Senate, the confirmation rate rises to over 85%.”
So what does this mean for President Obama’s nominee?
Eisgruber writes, “All this bodes well for Judge Sotomayor, the nominee of a popular president just beginning his term whose party controls the Senate by a hefty margin.”
Eisgruber will also discuss his recent book The Next Justice in a Firedoglake Book Salon tomorrow at 3:00 PM est, hosted by Professor Rebecca Brown.
In the April 6th issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner describes a “a document—labeled ‘confidential’ and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA’s Mr. Rizzo would show it—that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at ‘the black sites’ and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an ‘alternative set of procedures.’”
On Slate yesterday, torture expert Darius Rejali details how these “procedures” fit into the long and dark history of democratic torture–where they’ve appeared before and how they developed.
As Rejali writes, “All the techniques in the accounts of torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, as reported Monday, collected from 14 detainees held in CIA custody, fit a long historical pattern of Anglo-Saxon modern. The ICRC report apparently includes details of CIA practices unknown until now, details that point to practices with names, histories, and political influences. In torture, hell is always in the details.”
Rejali is the author of Torture and Democracy, the definitive work on tortures that are not intended to leave marks on the body.
Amar Bhide has an excellent op-ed on the resiliency of venturesome consumption even in times of financial crisis over at the Wall Street Journal today. Click through to read the entire thing, but here’s a bit of silver lining:
The good news is that the cutbacks are likely to be more severe in the less productive kind of consumption. History suggests that Americans don’t shirk from venturesome consumption in hard times. The personal computer took off in the dark days of the early 1980s. I paid more than a fourth of my annual income to buy an IBM XT then — as did millions of others. Similarly, in spite of the Great Depression, the rapid increase in the use of new technologies made the 1930s a period of exceptional productivity growth. Today, sales of Apple’s iPhone continue to expand at double-digit rates. Low-income groups (in the $25,000 to $49,999 income segment) are showing the most rapid growth, with resourceful buyers using the latest models as their primary device for accessing the Internet.
Two questions dominate our consideration of the fate of the world’s ancient heritage. The more vexing and urgent one — how can we prevent the looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade in antiquities -– is not the topic of this article. The second one is.
“Where do the great treasures of ancient art belong? In Western museums or in countries where the civilizations that created them once flourished?”
This question turns on two presumptions:
that antiquities are not where they belong, and
that civilizations create things and certain modern nation states have inalienable rights to them as heirs to those earlier civilizations.
Between January and October 2008, 63 pirate attacks were reported in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia. Somali pirates hijacked 26 ships; fired on 21; and took nearly 540 sailors hostage. By contemporary standards, at least, these “pirate statistics” are remarkable.
But an equally impressive “pirate statistic” has gone virtually unnoticed: the number of seamen who survived their harrowing captivities by Somali sea dogs and lived to tell the tale. For example, all of the Sirius Star’s sailors were “in good health” when their pirate captors released them. And they’re not alone. According to data from the International Maritime Bureau, in stark contrast to the impressive number of assaults, only one sailor has lost his life at Somali pirate hands.
…
Even a single death is a tragedy. But the number of confirmed, Somali pirate killings is surprisingly small—especially for a band of Kalashnikov-toting criminals. This hardly comports with our image of pirates as fiendish, blood-lusting curs. What gives? Are Somali pirates pacifists?
Hardly. But they are profit seekers. And just like their 18th-century predecessors, Somali sea dogs have discovered that it’s good business to treat their hostages decently—or at least to avoid killing them. Read on …
Featuring commentary and interviews from Princeton University Press authors, the PUP Blog is a highly respected, timely and indispensable source for learning, understanding and reflection.
