May 2012
83 posts
4 tags
“What I don’t want to see happen is for the magazine to become humorless or...”
– David Remnick, “Reporting: David Remnick in conversation with Paul Holdengräber”, May 31, 2006. Watch/listen to the event here…
3 tags
4 tags
4 tags
5 tags
Zadie Smith reads a Frank O'Hara poem as voice... →
This project is absolutely fantastic!
7 tags
12 tags
7 tags
RIP Doc Watson. Listen to the great folk musician... →
I am distraught over this, though he was getting up there. Here, he is playing with my other favorite bluegrass legend, Earl Scruggs.
9 tags
6 tags
“…the Constitution rated a slave as only three-fifths of a person. Did that...”
– Garry Wills in the latest New York Review of Books succinctly bringing up sincere issues that might arise if a Mormon candidate becomes president. Specifically, the question: “Will a Mormon president treat constitutional clauses as divine injunctions?”
Wills came to LIVE on February 1,...
6 tags
Watch: Atul Gawande on The Checklist Manifesto:... →
We also recommend perusing the other videos from Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s MD Video Education Center. Specifically, the procedural surgery videos (good for a lot of loud cries similar to the sounds that accompany viewing horror flicks.)
4 tags
Destroying the Color Line: John Hope Franklin &...
President Bill Clinton: What do you think the root in our deepest soul of racial prejudice is? Do you think it is fear of the other? You could argue back from the time of the dawn of the republic through the Civil War and well after that there was some sort of economic motive behind slavery and then Jim Crow. But you can’t make that case anymore. What is the root of it? Why does it persist in the face of all evidence that the more we get along across various color lines, the better off we are? How can it persist after 9/11, when we lost three thousand people from seventy countries here, including over two hundred of them Muslims, when we’ve got grade schools in New York City with people from eighty different racial and ethnic groups. What is the root of it? Why does it endure?
John Hope Franklin: I think that the root of it is our unwillingness to concede that we were made in this country as a part of its development, as a part of its growth, as a part of its prosperity, as a part of its richness, we have made no effort to recognize the way in which various constituent elements of our society have contributed to its growth and development. Yes, we have had Katrina, we’ve had the Civil War, we’ve had all these other things, but each one of these experiences, even the tragedies, bring out the indescribable developments that have rested on this country’s conscience all these years and we have never yet been willing to concede that these problems are part of every American’s problems.
President Bill Clinton: Why? Why have we been unwilling to do that? ’Cause we’re afraid of the political ramifications, because we’re afraid it would hurt us to look in the mirror and feel that much guilt? Why haven’t we done it?
John Hope Franklin: I don’t believe we’ve actually looked into the mirror. That’s why I call this little essay of mine Mirror to America. I want them to do precisely that. But let me just see if I can—Let me just suggest some of the few ways in which we have, over the years, not done this. Thomas Jefferson said that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and I have problems thinking that he really meant it, for he held people in bondage; not only did he hold people in bondage but he refused to do anything that would mitigate their bondage, and that would deliver them into freedom. He pleaded with John Coles, his protégé, that he, John Coles, should not set his slaves free, and he wrote in his Notes on Virginia how deeply flawed African Americans were in their makeup—biological, physiological, intellectual. That’s our Thomas Jefferson. If a man of the Enlightenment, one of the great figures of all times, holds these views, and continues to hold them, even when he’s sleeping with a black woman, what hope is there for someone less enlightened to take any heroic step?
President Bill Clinton: You think people in power still believe that? Do you think that people in positions of authority still believe that?
John Hope Franklin: I think that people in authority, that many people in authority, continue to believe that. How else can we explain the reluctance on the part of people in the twentieth century to make any significant concessions to black people? How do you explain the fact that, here in New York City, even when I was chairman of the History Department at Brooklyn College, that no real estate dealer in Brooklyn would even show me a house?...
WatchA short documentary focusing on David Byrne and Brian Eno, and their collaborative album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
via Open Culture
6 tags
“The story is a running scroll of a spy keeping a log of her current mission. Ms....”
– “A Jennifer Egan Original … Tweet by Tweet”
The New Yorker will be publishing a new fiction piece in the next issue by Jennifer Egan, written entirely in tweets. This reminded me of her short story published in The Guardian last summer in list form.
It’s sort of funny that Egan...
“By 1892, both the Astor and Lenox libraries were experiencing financial difficulties. The combination of dwindling endowments and expanding collections had compelled their trustees to reconsider their mission. At this juncture, John Bigelow, a New York attorney and Tilden trustee, devised a bold plan whereby the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust would be...
“You’re aware of the fact that you have reached a certain stage in your life....”
– Derek Walcott on publishing his Collected Poems from this Paris Review interview
8 tags
5 tags
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the...”
– Joan Didion on self-respect, a must-read. (via explore-blog)
I just re-read Slouching, and it’s so powerful to read as a twenty-something year-old woman living in New York in 2012, while remembering that Didion wrote this prose in her late twenties/early thirties.
7 tags
“There’s a wonderfulness in stubbornness, about simply refusing to let even the...”
– Elizabeth Gilbert at LIVE last May. She’ll be here tomorrow with John Hodgman, except this time, they’re talking east coast cuisine. Anyone make it to Frenchtown this past weekend?
“Spain figured out about fifteen years ago, kind of like England did twenty years...”
– Mario Batali at LIVE on November 18, 2006 for the program, Gluttony: Mario Batali, Dan Barber, Barbara Kafka & Corby Kummer, which was co-presented with The Atlantic.
We also had Ferran Adrià here in 2008 with Corby Kummer and Harold McGee on the occasion of his book A Day at elBulli. elBulli...
4 tags
7 tags
5 tags
Watchareasofmyexpertise:
If you doubt my existence, I will be making THREE PHYSICAL MANIFESTATIONS in the coming days.
MANIFESTATION ONE shall be this very Friday, May 19, as COULTON and I join to toast our friend, the genius named DAVID REES, Artisanal Pencil Sharpener, at the conclusion of his HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS book tour.
This will happen at Public Assembly, and tickets are HERE. ALL...
4 tags
WatchTo kick off this day of celebrating incredible women who’ve become mothers of ideas and change and intellect, we bring you Angela Davis and Toni Morrison.
