the new yorker kicks your ass

my friends are likely sick of hearing me explain how much i love the new yorker. but screw you all. here are some comments from last week's issue i'd meant to post a while ago. they're split into subsections.

john cassidy on grover norquist
karl rove gets a lot of attention for the intimate relationship he maintains with bush.

but there are others who have not only impacted bush's thinking, but have also influenced the entire administration, effectively the head of every federal agency that, whether you like it or not, enters at some point in virtually every sector of your life.

one of those men is leo strauss, a university of chicago professor who greatly influenced some of the more prominent neoconservatives in the bush camp with his taste for nietzsche's "will to power." harper's wrote about him last year, but he's not of interest to me here.

another man is grover norquist, head of the influential advocacy group americans for tax reform. norquist is most well known for his infamous wednesday d.c. breakfast meetings in which high ranking inside-the-beltway republicans gather and discuss how best to widdle the government down so small that it can be "drowned in the bathtub."

more recently, the new yorker and others have identified evidence suggesting norquist has been selling his influence to various interested parties around the country including indian casinos. the new yorker's piece also highlights norquist's cozy relationship with tom delay and the notorius lobbyist jack abramoff.

norquist is rabid in his desire to break down the tax structure in the united states, and cassidy captures his essence damn well. not to mention, new yorker profiles are considered some of the best in journalism.

i'd love to write more, but i need to cut back on my analysis and demand that you assholes go and read it yourselves. i'm simply a worthless conduit.

philip gourevitch on sri lanka
i've liked this guy for a while now. he's a freakin's badass. he published the compelling text that ran alongside war photographer james nachtwey's image essay in the last issue of mother jones. the series depicted the brutal existances of street kids in indonesia. if you've never seen nachtwey's work, find a few shots online. he's one of the best the world has to offer.

shortly after the mother jones piece, gourevitch published an in-depth look at the ongoing, decades-long war taking place in sri lanka, the relatively small island-nation off the southeast coast of india.

sri lanka's savage war has been wiped under the rug somewhat by a global press focus on iraq, palestine/israel and the sudan. but gourevitch intellegently describes the country as still consumed by violence, even post-tsunami, and the war itself continues to share components with conflicts taking place in most other developing countries: child armies and forced conscription, religious and ethnic tension, early well-meaning revolutionaries turned ruthless demoagogues, neighboring more powerful countries botching attempts to fix the situation or straight-up fortifying one side it favors ethnically or religiously, and so on.

gourevitch quotes the wonderful mark twain from a trip the satiristonce made to the island, then called ceylon:

". . .there was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings -- and then the tumult of crashing thunder and the downpour -- and presently all sunny and smiling again."

damn i love twain.

gourevitch is skilled at living and breathing a subject until he's prepared to write about it in-depth. last year, he wrote for the new yorker an exhaustive profile of the former tulsa billionaire bill bartmann, the one-time power of which tulsans have tended to neglect.

check his shit out.

jeffrey toobin on lgbt issues and the supreme court
this was a shorter piece, so i won't spend a lot of time writing about it.

but this is the first time i've seen a truly soild, informative analysis of how a change of the supreme court's composition could greatly impact the direction of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered's movement for equal rights. and the focus of the piece isn't on gay marriage.

this piece gets into the mechanics of the court system and gives some cool insight into an area that many folks tend to misinterpret, in terms of what legal pronouncements should do and how truly different they are from decisions coming out of the two other branches of government.

check it.