The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/03/09

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You Get What You Pay For

After the MBA professors sort out what went wrong at Enron, AIG and Fannie Mae, I hope they’ll take a fact-finding trip to the Taco Bell/KFC franchise on 14th Street near U Street in Washington DC. Though I can barely stomach the food, I stopped in there several weeks ago so that I could quickly eat something before meeting friends for happy hour. What a disaster. The incompetence impressed me so much that I’ve been back three times to observe the workers. Just now I waited 45 minutes for a bean and cheese burrito, a hard shell taco and a water. It’s fascinating.

As an In-N-Out loyalist, I’ve had occasion to observe the best in fast food workers up close. Hell if I can figure out what enables them to speedily deliver perfect fresh burgers and fries sans freezers or heat lamps, whereas the folks I’ve been observing can’t even manage to shoot the sour cream gun so that its contents are dispersed evenly throughout the burrito, rather than clustered so that your first or last bite is all sour cream. I’ve never worked fast food, but I am a frequent observer and regular participant in burrito assembly that doesn’t even benefit from the latest in condiment projectile technology. It ain’t that hard.

Funny thing is that the guy manning the cash register appears to be a model of competence. He takes orders quickly, gives accurate change promptly, and smiles as he hands you a crisp numbered receipt. This is where the process breaks down. Behind the counter are five employees whose attention is divided among the Taco Bell products and KFC products — that is to say, if anyone has clear responsibilities for any aspect of food assembly it isn’t evidence from the chaos the customer observers. The kitchen staff bumps into one another, shouts frantically, is always forgetting to put new biscuits in the oven, etc. The way they move you’d think it’s everyone’s first day, but I’ve seen the same faces again and again. A task like removing a plastic bag from a bundle of same, putting several tacos inside and handing it to a customer in exchange for his receipt lends itself to increasingly dexterous movements over time. Here there is a lot of fuss needed to separate the bags, a lot of fumbling with the food, and awkward receipt exchanges.

Worse than anything, however, is the sheer time elapsed. The average Taco Bell customer is conditioned to expect their food will be delivered promptly — it isn’t a surprise if you order a soft taco and are handed same immediately. The 14th Street location is filled with exasperated customers waiting for their Mexican Pizza or Chalupa or KFC variety bucket, and there is a certain camaraderie that develops as these folks make eye contact with one another, roll their pupils up in their head, and listen to one another’s stomachs growling.

I’m sure I’ll return again to observe some more — I’d really like to understand the place well enough to know where the actual breakdown is — though of course if the service becomes significantly better, I’ll definitely stop patronizing it, as there are far better options nearby whether measured by food or atmosphere. Perhaps some DC business consultant will read this, get curious, and visit for him or herself, in which case you should e-mail me. We’ll go together! I’ll even buy.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/03/09

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November 5, 2004

To: Verizon Wireless Customer Service
From: Conor Friedersdorf
Subject: Can You Hear Me Now?

Dear Underpaid “Customer Care Associate”:

I once answered phones for Mazda Motors of America, manning the 1-800 number customers call when their vehicles break down.

“Zoom zoom,” I’d greet callers.

My supervisor never told me to say that, but I found caricaturing the summer job helped to make its degrading moments more palatable. So many callers were primed to “tear me a new one,” as we say in the business. Thankfully I devised a strategy to check their tirades:

Me: “Zoom zoom! This is Mazda.”

Customer: “My Miata just broke down for the fifth time!”

Me: “Yelling at me makes some Mazda owners feel better, sir. Go ahead.”

The Preemptive Theory of Customer Service worked nine times out of ten. Perhaps you can employ it to your advantage?

Surely our rapport now approaches what I felt for a few favorite customers who empathized so fully that it seemed they too were staring at the pale gray walls of my cubicle, listening to the portly co-worker across the aisle clear the phlegm from his throat. They alone fathomed my power: my ability to subsidize repairs, to send them leather driving gloves or deluxe floor mats, to provide free oil changes to last ten thousand miles!

Are you imbued with similar discretion?

If so, consider my plight. I’ve given Verizon Wireless the best years of my mobile-phone-using life. But I’m moving to Europe in a few days, two months remaining on my service contract.

Surely we can find a way to overlook this unfortunate circumstance? If so, I’d love to re-sign with your employer when I return from Europe (having already written its Customer Service supervisors to commend the prodigy who kept my business).

Yours,

Conor Friedersdorf
Account #145656998

p.s. Do you drive an aging Mazda 626? Good luck with that transmission!

by Matt Feeney

07/03/09

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Alexis Arguello, RIP

In the world of boxing, Kevin Rooney is famous for two things. He was Mike Tyson’s trainer during the brighter half of Tyson’s career, and, before that, in 1982, he was the victim of a spectacular one-punch knockout at the hands of Alexis Arguello. It was one of those perfect boxing moments, in which a crafty, technically brilliant, and heavy-punching champion sees an opening and exploits it. The punch itself was audible, if not visible. It was, in fact, too perfect. Rooney went down in a way that made the count, for everyone watching, a formality bordering on sarcasm. He was – spiritually, mentally – nowhere in the building. It was worrisome, actually, and Arguello was visibly worried. Instead of thrusting his hands up and prancing around the ring, he simply turned back to his corner for the length of the count and immediately came back to stand among Rooney’s cornermen as they worked to rouse their fighter.

I bring this up because Arguello’s legacy as a boxer – leaving aside his legacy as an anti-Sandinista rebel and elected mayor of Managua and, this past week, victim of an apparent suicide – tends to overemphasize his first big fight with junior welterweight champ Aaron Pryor. I say overemphasize because even before he went up in weight class to box Pryor, he was a singular fighter. If he had decided to rule as a lightweight for the rest of his career (he had started as a featherweight), his status in the pantheon would have been assured. There were divisions among boxing fans – especially when it came to Hearns and Leonard – but there were no divisions when it came to Alexis Arguello. Everyone loved Arguello. He was handsome. He was a sportsman and gentleman, sincere, modest, reverent toward his sport. And, in the ring, he called to mind, more than any other boxer of the time, what Richard Pryor said about Sugar Ray Robinson: “Sugar Ray? Sugar Ray fight so good it make your dick hard.”

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by Peter Suderman

07/02/09

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Dillinger Escape Plan

In some ways, Public Enemies is a substantially weaker film than either of director Michael Mann’s last two films, Collateral and Miami Vice. It’s less coherent, less focused, and lessstructurally confident; Mann comes across as uncertain about why he is attracted to the two lead characters. As a result, the movie often feels as if he’s shoehorning them into hisstandardized Tough, Cool, and Stoic paradigm. At their best, Mann’s movies wrestle with the tragedies and contradictions of masculinity; Public Enemies merely displays its masculine archetypes without comment.

That said, Public Enemies is a more ambitious film than anything he’s attempted since Ali (easily his worst movie, and his only true failure). It’s an attempt to move back toward the period- and place-driven 90s epics — Last of the Mohicans, Heat, and The Insider — that continue to define his reputation as a director. And for that, he deserves some credit. Mann is one of the few directors who can make a big-budget, star-driven summer action film that attempts a measure of complexity and ambiguity; that, by withholding information (sometimes too much), pushes the audience to engage rather than to surrender their mental facilities; that is at least as concerned with the quiet moments as with the loud and flashy ones. Public Enemies does not succeed on all of these fronts, but it makes a worthy attempt.

Mann often struggles as a storyteller, but he is among Hollywood’s most muscular filmmakers, a director with a stunning, singular cinematic eye. And over the last few years, he’s turned that eye toward high-definition video. Along with David Fincher, Mann is the director most responsible for pushing the boundaries of HD filmmaking. His HD camera work in Public Enemies is his best yet, and may represent the first truly successful attempt to develop a uniquely digital movie aesthetic. Zodiac, Collateral, and Miami Vice all looked breathtaking, in their own ways (Zodiac in particular), but all seemed to take their cues from 35mm. Rather than aim to look film-like, though, Public Enemies revels in the virtues of digital filmmaking; Mann gives the movie a crisp, crystalline sheen that comes across as both colder and closer than traditional film — more like human vision than a camera’s lens. Flawed as it is, the startlingcinematography, along with Mann’s gift for macho iconography, make Public Enemies one of the year’s better movies, and a comparatively subtle alternative to the mind-numbing eardrum blasts that typically pass for midsummer action movies.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/02/09

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Infinite Conors

On a just-posted Bloggingheads I face off against Conor Clarke. Here we talk about Infinite Jest.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/02/09

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How to Tell Stories in Print

Over at The Atlantic, I’ve been interviewing Jack Hitt, one of my favorite journalists. If you’ve never heard the This American Life episode The Super, do yourself the favor of consuming it immediately. It’s just damn good storytelling. The same can be said for Jack’s magazine stories. One example is Toxic Dreams, one of the most impressive magazine stories I’ve ever read. The subject is an environmental lawsuit filed by folks exposed to toxic waste that overflowed from a nearby dumping ground. It’s one of those stories where most writers would get hopelessly lost in the almost impenetrable details. Somehow Jack Hitt turns it into a narrative masterpiece.

As a writer who aspires to long form non-fiction, I find storytelling the most difficult aspect of the craft. How does one know how best to organize a piece? I’ve studied Ian Frazier, Lawrence Weschler, John McPhee and sundry others, and picked up some tricks along the way. It is nevertheless immensely comforting to read Jack’s advice on how to tell a great story in print:

I have spent a long time looking for short cuts to the answer to this very question. But I haven’t found any. So, begin by over-reporting and over-researching everything. If the story involves talking to people, talk to them as long as they will stand to have you around and then talk to them some more. Keep reading. Outline a structure to the piece. Set that aside for now. Realize you don’t know enough. Go over all your interviews and research notes again, only this time, make a laundry list of all the great details, large and small, along with the best quotes. Look at that list a lot. Begin the process of re-reading all of your research. Bail out of re-reading all of your research by convincing yourself that what you really need is a long walk to think about “structure.” Walk toward your shoes and look at them. Blow off the walk altogether. Descend into a shame spiral. Now, catch up on your HBO tivo’d backlog. After several hours, take another ride on the shame spiral. Lumber over to the desk and go over the interviews again. Make notes of your notes in tiny scrawl so that they can fit on a single sheet of paper. Look at the details. Write down the big ideas that form the superstructure of the piece. Realize you are a pompous git for thinking that ideas have anything to do with it and go back to that list of details. Set it aside. Read some blogs.
The next day, re-read the single sheet of paper with the notes of your notes and wonder, what does this shit even mean? Then outline a structure. Indulge in a nice long afternoon of intense self-loathing. Start to write according to that outline. Throw that draft away. Write a new outline. Go over your notes. Re-interview a few people. Realize, as if you hadn’t realized this a thousand times before (most recently, a few minutes before) that your own big ideas about this story are pathetic, but this list of details and the more decent quotations from the interviews—there’s some pretty good stuff in there. Fiddle with writing a few more paragraphs. Microwave your cold cup of coffee for the third time. Go over your notes again. Yell irrationally at your spouse/child/dog/a bare wall. Now, kick the wall. Limp. Review all the transcribed interviews one more time from beginning to end. Paste a large sheet of paper to a wall and, standing up with a fresh cup of coffee in your hand, outline the piece in really big letters. Realize that you’ve misunderstood the point of the entire story all this time. Scream the word, “fuck” really loud in an empty room. Do this about 40 times. Wipe off the flopsweat. Look at the notes on the single sheet of paper and realize just how brilliant they are, or moronic. Espy the grime on your bike chain—it could use a good cleaning with some WD-40. Start writing the lead paragraph again. Set that aside. Find that single cartoon frame from “Peanuts” that you keep in a box somewhere, the one in which Snoopy is reading a publisher’s rejection letter for his novel that goes, “Has it ever occurred to you that you may be the worst writer in the history of the world?” Read it and laugh. Later that day, read it again and not laugh. Feel really, really sad. Go over your notes one more time. Look at earlier drafts and passages and realize that maybe this stuff here is the lead, actually, and then if you follow that outline from seven outlines ago, it just might work. Re-read the last couplet of the first strophe of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Look at those riffs in the earlier draft again and realize some are not that bad. Convince yourself that your bike chain really does need another good cleaning and what’s that gunk on the inside of the rear fender? Read the latest draft-like substance and think that, with a little work, maybe this won’t be too embarrassing. Feel mildly excited that there could actually be something here worth reading eventually. Look at the list of details again. Re-read the edited draft and start to feel better. Or, if not, set it aside and then repeat all of the above instructions, only this time, after each step, masturbate.

See the rest of my interview with Jack here and here.

by Noah Millman

07/02/09

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Live and In Person

The more I think about it, the more I think this is going to be a big part of the future media revenue model. It’s basically analogous to the way that the music industry has evolved. Once upon a time, concerts were a minor part of how musicians made money; the real money was in a record deal. Now, as the cost of distribution of high-quality recordings has dropped nearly to zero, this business model has suffered terribly. So a greater and greater percentage of revenues in the music industry comes from the sale of concert tickets (and private concert bookings) – and the price of these has skyrocketed. Effectively, the distributed music becomes an ad for the live performance.

The movie industry looks different – for now. Right now, blockbuster openings and short theater runs are treated (financially) as ads for the sale of DVDs. HBO, as I understand, works similarly. But as distribution of video over the internet gets more common and easier, the price of distribution will drop towards zero – and this will cut into the profitability of this business model, no matter what copywright law says and no matter what technological developments spring up to prevent people from sharing their videos. You’ll probably still have some kind of micro-pricing of content from the best providers, a la iTunes, but as it gets harder to make money from distributing video, the industry will find ways to make live events more appealing – very likely by including live (or “live” interactive video appearances broadcast to theaters around the world) of the stars combined with more extravagantly impressive movie houses. And these events will get much more expensive.

Text media will probably go the same way. Distributing textual content is now effectively free, and so the book, magazine and newpaper industries are all in free-fall. One thing they still can sell is the physical presence and/or opportunity to interact with their most popular writers. Because this is an inherently scarce resource, its price will be bid up if there’s demand. And the wider a writer’s work is distributed, the higher will be the demand. Malcolm Gladwell’s business model already looks like this. His writing is plausibly understood as an ad for his live appearances as much as it is a revenue stream in its own right. And his live appearances are very expensive. Ditto for Tom Friedman, and so forth.

Of course, the sorts of writers who will be most in demand for this sort of thing are unlikely to be reporters – they’re likely to be people who are good at communicating, even performing, rather than people who dig up facts. Where are these people likely to wind up, and how will they be paid? Well, apart from public-interest journalism (which might get funded by non-profits, though this will likely mean it is advocacy journalism), and private-interest journalism (the sort of thing you’d pay for because you want to get it in an especially timely fashion, or because it’s a niche product of great value to a small group of people capable of paying for it), it’s conceivable that some of these people wind up being paid by the stars, either directly as research assistants or indirectly as part of some kind of revenue-share with a media corporation.

Is this ruminating on my part just commonplace at this point? Or is there anything interesting in what I’m noodling here.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/02/09

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April 1, 2004

To: Michael Doyle, Brian Buckingham
CC: Nicole Bennett, Nicholas Fonte, Tara Plochocki
From: Conor Friedersdorf
Subject: Insufferable Overachievers

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by Reihan Salam

07/02/09

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Quick Observations Re: The Death of Macho

I’ll be writing a fair bit about this Death of Macho notion, but I wanted to highlight a smart comment I found via Feministing by jason_said:

On the one hand, given the international scope of the statistics and trends he compiles, Salam is highlighting a real problem that has distinctive gender dynamics. Not least to protect the immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities as well as the women vulnerable to unstable, unemployed young men’s violence and harassment and sometime-fascist politics, we should be thinking about their experience and how to respond creatively. (That isn’t to deny that some women contribute to such oppression, of course—and their experience should be studied as well.) Such a commitment does not have to entail opposition to women’s advancement or any denial whatsoever of the discrimination, hostility, and inequality women continue to face. In fact, just as denying the gender-oriented problems of women in favor of a facile universalism conceals institutionalized sexist patterns, so too envisioning gender equality requires examining the psychology and sociology of male sexism.

On the other hand, I agree with Fortini’s piece that Salam is guilty of some essentialism here.

That’s very fair. It’s definitely written in broad strokes; my hope was that I was nevertheless drawing attention to an important phenomenon, recognizing that I’d necessarily miss a lot of subtleties.

And as Martin recognizes, focus on gender-specific problems can serve to obscure the ways women’s advancement can often benefit men and vice versa—the reality of interdependence that sounds less provocative than narratives of gender conflict.

This is clearly true. Yet I suppose I’m very interested in this idea of conflict between societies that embrace the feminist revolution and those that don’t, which tend to be societies with abnormal sex ratios. That is, the essential conflict won’t be over ideology or supposed “civilizations”; rather, it will be over how different societies react to modernity.

Finally, it should be said that nowhere does Salam come close to claiming that sexism has ended. Indeed, he speculates that to some degree, it will be an obstacle to equality and economic growth for the whole of the twenty-first century. Indeed, one has to hope he is being too pessimistic here.

This is absolutely right. I basically think that societies that continue to discriminate against women are doomed to violence, ignorance, poverty, and disease. If given the chance to write a book about this theme of global conflict driven by the presence or absence of women’s equality (I’d like to!), a hefty section would focus on the development data: female literacy is the key indicator.

Some people are claiming — rather strangely — that I think sexism is over. That’s flatly absurd. It is real and it is pervasive. But like Robert Max Jackson, author of the brilliant Destined for Equality, I think that competitive markets guarantee the rise of women to leadership roles.

The search for profits, votes, organizational rationality, and stability all favored a gender-neutral approach that improved women’s status. The inherent gender impartiality of organizational interests won out over the prejudiced preferences of the men who ran them.

Others seem to suggest that I don’t think violence against women is a serious problem, which strikes me as baffling. A longer version of the piece spent considerable time on how domestic violence predicts internal instability and external aggression, but my editors concluded, not unreasonably, that this research, much of its conducted by BYU political scientist Valerie Hudson, wasn’t directly salient to the thesis.

But I think there’s a too-appealing narrative here: right-wing mini-pundit claims that sexism is dead and that men are the new victims. The fact that I don’t believe that sexism is dead — I think it’s alive and well, but that it is actually an increasingly economically destructive force and that the least sexist societies are the ones that will flourish — or that men are the new victims — I tried to argue that men continue to be powerfully advantaged by state economic policies in most of the world, though this is tentatively and encouragingly changing in a few advanced market democracies — is basically immaterial.

You can’t win ‘em all.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/01/09

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September 2, 2003

To: Nicole Bennett, Nicholas Fonte, Tara Plochocki
From: Conor Friedersdorf
Subject: Let’s All Move to Spain…

…one year from today.

I’m serious.

C

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/01/09

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Fox News Guest: America Needs Osama to Attack

In recent months, I’ve had several people ask me why it is that I criticize “my own team” in blog posts. The answer is sometimes that I think they’re wrong, that I care about public discourse more than any political movement, and that anyway honest criticism strengthens a movement.

But the answer for some people I criticize is that they’re just not on my team, and they shouldn’t be on yours either:

by Noah Millman

07/01/09

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Must I Hold a Candle To My Shame?

The question is kind of moot when the New York Times has done it for me.

by Conor Friedersdorf

07/01/09

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An Opening for Anti-Corporate Cons

by Reihan Salam

07/01/09

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A New Way to Think About Life

The title of this post promises a lot — suffice it to say, the following won’t solve all of your problems, but it might offer a new and constructive way to think about some of them: the Cosmic Timekeeper theory. I’ve included this sketch because I tried to make this woman look world-weary and wise.

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by Noah Millman

06/30/09

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No Ordinary Venue

Sorry to have been away for so long, but not sorry at all about the reason – I’ve been on vacation, in Iceland.

Highlights included:

Snowmobiling on a glacier.

Walking amongst (and I do mean amongst) the puffins and great skuas on Ingólfshöfði.

The look on my son’s face when he found out Icelanders eat puffin.

Bathtub-temperature swimming pools everywhere.

Sparkling cool waterfalls everywhere.

Seeing a blue whale fluke on a whale watch out of Húsavík.

The look on my son’s face when he found out Icelanders eat whale.

Hiking the lava fields near Mývatn.

Horseback riding in the somewhat-less-active-and-a-bit-older lava fields also near Mývatn.

The look on my son’s face when he found out Icelanders eat horse.

Never being blamed by anyone for having participated in the destruction of their economy. (Not that I personally did any business with the Icelandic banks – I didn’t – but they were pretty much all wiped out because of investments in structured credit products.)

Anyway, I’m back now. But I miss being there. It’s a marvelous country. Go visit.

by Alan Jacobs

06/30/09

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watch your language

Russell Arben Fox has given us a nice introduction and response to a debate that’s going on between the Postmodern Conservatives and the Front Porch Republicans. I don't think the debate is getting anywhere, and I think the chief impediment is the key term of the debate.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s line about the weather: Whenever people talk to me about modernity, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. The problem is that what we call “modernity” is a collection of propositions and practices, of varying degrees of interconnectedness, and within various spheres of life. Modernity is a matter of political economy, but also of epistemology, and then again of technology, and so on and so on. No two people seem to conceive of the relations among these in the same ways, and people who are proponents or opponents of modernity — and I include people like the estimable Herr Professor Poulos who are willing employ the “post” language, as well as those who ally themselves with the “pre” — are never really reacting to modernity tout court, but always to some particular aspect of it, one (or at most a few) of the cogs in the great machine.

So when people tell me that they want to recover the wisdom of the pre-modern, I just want to know what in particular they are talking about. At least tell me whether you’re talking economics, politics, moral philosophy, epistemology, theology, or what. And then we can narrow it down from there. Ditto when people vocally embrace the postmodern condition. What is it, precisely, to which you wish to be “post”? And now that you are post-X, what Y have you entered? Spell it out for me, one cog at a time.

The philosopher Bernard Williams used to say that we suffer from a poverty of concepts. Never more so, I think, than when we have useless arguments about modernity and its putative predecessors and successors. We think we know what we mean when we use such language, but the fruitlessness of our debates shows that there really isn't substantive agreement. So my suggestion is that we all try to make our arguments — whether they are for something or against something — without ever employing that particular string of letters: “modern.” It would be a good discipline for everyone.

by Conor Friedersdorf

06/30/09

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September 1, 2003

To: Brian Buckingham
From: Conor Friedersdorf
Subject: My Debt to You

Buck,

When I arrived at college you lent me a copy of The Sun Also Rises, supplied Henry Weinhardt’s beer until I turned 21 and introduced me to caps: “It’s not a drinking game, it’s a drinking sport.”

More importantly, you went to Seville first and insisted I spend my semester abroad there so fervently that I followed.

It’s payback time.

You’ve been working a year longer than I for far more hours every week. In the next six months your fancy consulting firm will pay you twice my annual salary. As a Christmas bonus I’ll get a $20 gift card to Ralph’s Supermarket; you’ll receive a check with three zeroes. And did I mention that you’re working for 70 soul-crushing hours a week?

In a year’s time, you’ll be even more ready than I am to return to Seville. I’ll be there: I hereby commit.

Will you be?

Hasta Pronto,

Conor

by Conor Friedersdorf

06/30/09

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Feministing or Fox News?

Time to play everyone’s favorite game show!

Here’s excerpt one.

Imagine being in a totally sexually fixated state. Only instead of a person, your irresistible attraction involves an object or behavior.
Known as fetishes, people are often incredibly amused by their unconventional nature. But having a fetish can be emotionally and erotically gratifying in many respects, turning any judgment into a case of “who’s laughing now?”
So well-known is the foot fetish that it’s gone from laughable to a wholesome kink of sorts. Still an exploration of what it entails and why it exists can cause discomfort, which is why it’s remained so cryptic. Few are brave enough to unlock the mysteries of the foot fetish. Are you?

So is it Fox News or Feministing?

And excerpt two:

I am a Muslim woman and I do not wear the burqa or the headscarf. The constant reference in liberal media to those women who choose to wear it has made it increasingly difficult for the countless Muslim women, such as myself, to express our discomfort with it. This is because any outright criticism of the garment comes across as an intolerant attack on the religion of Islam as well as the Muslim women wearing it.
The reality is that many women have reason to dislike the burqa even when they do not harbor any Islamophobic sentiments. The fact is that the burqa is often imposed on women by hardline states or religious groups. The Saudi Arabian government forces women to wear the burqa in all public places. It also prohibits women from driving or travelling without a male relative. The Taliban imposed the burqa on women when it controlled Afghanistan before 2001. Today, it forces women to wear it in areas it controls in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In societies in which women are punished severely for not wearing it, the burqa is a part of a range of laws and policies designed to suppress women. It is not hard to see why many women in these societies associate the burqa with a highly repressive patriarchal structure that subjugates and confines women in the name of Islam.

Fox News or Feministing?

Answers here and here.

by Conor Friedersdorf

06/30/09

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August 31, 2003

To: Michael Doyle
From: Conor Friedersdorf
Subject: Let’s Go Back

Mike,

Two years ago…

We spent August traveling around France and Italy, sipping wine from jugs on the banks of European rivers… renting a motorboat that left us adrift off the coast of Positano… sipping absinthe on the beach in Rio Maggiore as the Italians played their guitars… skinny dipping with those Emory girls as a midnight moon cast glimmers on the Mediterranean Sea.

Two years ago today we arrived in Seville.

We saw bullfights and Real Bétis fútbol games, sipped Cruzcampo on the church steps in Plaza San Salvador and kissed guapas on the dance floors of discothèques.

We tore ourselves away somehow. It is one thing to depart Spain for another semester at college. But now—look, I love newspaper reporting, but am I really expected to work 40+ hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for decades? Am I to savor only two days off each week? Am I to vacation but two weeks per annum?

My alarm rings prior to 8 am every morning, so that I feel nauseous as I stumble to the bathroom, and my eyelids droop with fatigue until noon. Is your lot any better? Let us seize our 23rd year lest the momentum of life accumulate so fast that we never escape it!

I’m going back, my friend.

I’m going to eat Top Ramen, write freelance pieces for extra money, eschew concert tickets and avoid first dates. I’m going to save every extra cent for one year… and then I’m going back to Europe for as long as possible to spend it all.

Are you coming?

Seriously,

Conor

by Conor Friedersdorf

06/30/09

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The American Scene Book Review, Edited by Graeme Wood

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. A Brave New World reviewed by James Poulos.

4. You Shall Know Our Velocity reviewed by Freddie de Boer.

7. The Age of Innocence reviewed by Ross Douthat.

11. Atlas Shrugged reviewed by Will Wilkinson.

14. The Great Gatsby reviewed by Reihan Salam.

17. The Brothers Karamazov reviewed by Alan Jacobs.

22. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reviewed by Peter Suderman.

27. The Sun Also Rises reviewed by Conor Friedersdorf.

31. Lord of the Flies reviewed by Daniel Larison.

34. A Passage to India reviewed by Helen Rittlemeyer.

37. Lolita reviewed by Caitlin Flanagan.

42. Main Street reviewed by David Brooks

45. Tropic of Cancer reviewed by Cheryl Miller.

49. War and Peace reviewed by Noah Millman.

53. ___________________________

57. __________________________

61. ___________________________

64. ____________________________

(Spots left blank and TAS writers deliberately excluded to encourage suggestions in comments.)

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