Sunday Roundup

Image via lantram at Flickr

Politics & History

• Sherman Miles revisits the lead up to the attack upon Pearl Harbor in The Atlantic:
  

  Pearl Harbor struck a country satiated with war's alarms. True, we had put through the draft and had actually reached the shooting stage with German submarines. But as a people we were still talking of war, without really accepting its imminence. Then, into our national complacency, came a surprise blow at our strongest point!

• Martin Indyk, former US Ambassador to Israel and currently Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, who I met while in Israel, along with Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, write A New US Strategy for the Middle East in Foreign Affairs:
  

  Summary: To be successful in the Middle East, the Obama administration will need to move beyond Iraq, find ways to deal constructively with Iran, and forge a final-status Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

• Fawaz A. Gerges speculates on how a Palestinian-Israeli resolution may come about and what it may look like within and Obama administration at Dissent Magazine:
  

  Contrary to the doomsayers and naysayers, there now exists a real potential for a breakthrough in the one-hundred-year-old Middle East crisis. A relative consensus appears to have emerged in the Arab world and Israel alike that a comprehensive peace settlement, as opposed to bilateral agreements, will be most viable and durable. Top leaders in both camps reference the Arab peace plan advanced by Saudi Arabia in 2002 and endorsed by the Arab League which involves recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.

• New York Times Sunday Magazine has Roger Cohen, editor of The Times and International Herald Tribune examine what a 21st century Cuba may look like:
  

  ...on Havana’s streets the name Obama is often uttered as if it were a shibboleth. Many people want to believe he offers a way out of the Cuban web that Fidel’s infinite adroitness and intermittent ruthlessness have woven over a half-century.

Business & Money

• In The Nation John Nichols explores the fascinating labor sit-in occurring right now within a Chicago factory:
  

  "We're going to stay here until we win justice," says Blanca Funes, 55, of Chicago, who was one of the UE members occupying the Republic factory over the weekend for several hours..."Their goal is to at least get the compensation that workers are owed; they also seek the resumption of operations at the plant," explains the union. "All 260 members of the local were laid off Friday in a sudden plant closing, brought on by Bank of America cutting off operating credit to the company. The bank even refused to authorize the release of money to Republic needed to pay workers their earned vacation pay, and compensation they are owed under the federal WARN Act because they were not given the legally-required notice that the plant was about to close."

• BusinessWeek takes an in depth look at the 'un-retired' with Heather Green's cover story:
  

  These are The Unretired. Seniors who thought they were set for life just a year ago now face the prospect of going back to work for two, five, even 10 years. They're sprucing up their résumés, calling old work contacts, and flocking to employment sites. There are no reliable stats yet on how many retirees are looking for work, but there are clear signs the number is growing. RetirementJobs.com, the largest career site for people over 50, saw traffic more than double, from 250,000 visitors in July to 600,000 in November. In April, before the worst of the market downturn, a survey conducted by the seniors group AARP found that 17% of responding retirees over 50 were considering or already going back to work.

• Boston Globe publishes "A Field Guide to Economics and Finance Blogs:"
  

  As the bailout plan unfolded, the bloggers offered historical context along with cutting critiques of the proposal. More important still, they offered counterproposals: direct capital injections into banks, for example, or direct purchases of mortgages. Many of their readers began badgering their senators and representatives to oppose the plan. A few weeks later, Congress rebuffed Paulson, sending shockwaves through global financial markets.

• American Public Media, an amazing resource and the second largest producer of public radio programming has released their Whiteboard Series, a number of extraordinarily informative videos on the financial crisis such as this one:
  
  How credit cards become asset-backed bonds from Marketplace on Vimeo.
  
  

Arts & Humanities

• Jenny Eliscu explores "Rocks Best Scene" for Rolling Stone:
  

  Laurel Canyon is one of rock's most mythic neighborhoods: This is where Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young first folded their voices into one beautiful harmony; where Zappa welcomed artists including Hendrix and Mick Jagger to parties at his infamous "Log Cabin" in 1968. Laurel Canyon was the inspiration for the Doors' "Love Street," the Mamas and the Papas' "12:30 (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)," CSNY's "Our House" and an entire album by British blues legend John Mayall. It's where music-business legends David Geffen, Jac Holtzman and Elliot Roberts helped build the recording careers of the singer-songwriters who defined the very essence of the Sixties California sound.

• The Christian Science Monitor has released their "Best Novels of 2008" list.
  
  
• Three stories published by the Paris Review were nominated for the 2008 National Magazine Award and all of them are available for free online:


• “Monsieur Kalashnikov” by André Aciman
• “Speak No Evil” by Uzodinma Iweala
• “Icebergs” by Alistair Morgan


• Art Basel began on December 3 and ends today. Financial Times' Georgina Adams takes a look (free registration may be required):
  

  Light relief at the fair’s opening night was offered by the Japanese art superstar Takashi Murakami, who dressed up in one of his plush flowerballs. He didn’t have to fool about for long, as the rapper Pharrell Williams (of N.E.R.D. and the Neptunes) quickly acquired the piece, “Gigantic Plush Flowerball Small”, for a cool $70,000.

Sunday Roundup

Arts & Culture

• Harrey Eyres deplores The Curse of Literalism in this weekend's Financial Times:
  

  You would think all this had thoroughly informed our way of thinking; we take great care not to impose unthinkingly one-dimensional interpretations on other cultures – not to be chauvinists. But the one area where we seem to have become unthinkingly literal is our own culture and its key texts. Few nowadays, apart from zealots and academics, read the Bible or Shelley at all, and if they do they struggle to see beyond the literal meaning.

• Over at Vanity Fair, Lisa Robinson celebrates Motown with an oral history in It Happened in Hitsville:
  

  After half a century, and several shelves of books about the revolutionary music label, Motown’s story is still obscured by rumors and misconceptions. Founder Berry Gordy Jr. joins a groundbreaking chorus—Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Suzanne de Passe, and other legends—to give an oral history of the Detroit hitmaking machine, the cultural and racial breakthroughs it inspired, and life at “Hitsville,” as well as a true account of Gordy’s relationship with Diana Ross and the rise of the Supremes.

• Vanity Fair making this weeks list twice, with a well written and hilarious retrospective, England Made Them, looking at what makes the British so very strange:
  

  Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness heir whose father raised pigs in their drawing room. And Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And the Marquis of Bath, with 64 mistresses he calls “wifelets.” Tim Walker captures a cross section of proud standard-bearers in Britain’s long tradition of eccentricity as Christopher Hitchens explains why his native land often seems like one big Monty Python skit.

Politics

• In The Nation, Barbara Crossette untangles a fair amount of the unsettling and complicated chaos taking hold in Thailand:
  

  The sides in this battle are not what might be expected. The urban educated elite, the professionals with cell phones, the democrats who have stood bravely against military rule in the past are now the ones determined to provoke an army coup to overthrow a populist government they have been unable to defeat at the ballot box.

• Anne Applebaum raises some of the questions I asked about the attacks in Mumbai. Mainly, after 7 years of the 'war on terror' and at least hundreds of billions of dollars spent, how is it possible that authorities were ignorant of the pending attacks or the groups involved? Drawing parallels to some of the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan she states:
  

  It took some time before we understood that our opponents in Iraq were not merely disgruntled Baathists but encompassed a range of both Sunni and Shiite groups with different agendas. Only now, for that matter, do we fully understand the degree to which the very word Taliban is misleading: Though the term implies a definite group with clear goals, American commanders in Afghanistan now understand very well that what they call Taliban is also an amalgamation of insurgents, some of whom fight for tribal interests, others for money, and only some for a clear-cut ideological cause.

• Matt Taibbi in, Requiem for a Maverick, mixes comedy with analysis as he explores the inner depths of destruction that the McCain / Palin ticket brought to the Republican Party:
  

  The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

Food & Wine

• Porfolio Magazine's Amy Cortese examines the second labels of the world's winemakers of greatest renown:
  

  A bottle of Lafite for a fifth of the price? Makers of the world's most coveted wines make more versions that are younger, softer, and vastly more affordable.

• In Dueling Spanish Chefs, Gourmet Magazine interestingly, yet clumsily, wades into socio-political critique via the culture wars Spain has experienced post-Franco:
  

  In this sense, Adrià is like that other genius to come out of Spain’s transition to democracy, Pedro Almodóvar. Their media are of course different—spherified olives and parmesan-infused air for one; sex, drugs, and neurotic women in stilettos for the other. But the reckless joy of their exquisite creations, the provocative art disguised as humor and sensuality, are the same. So too is the drive, relentless but unstrained, to create anew. If in today’s Spain you can hardly recognize the grim, authoritarian place that subsisted largely on fried eggs and sexual repression 30 years ago, you can thank, in part, Adrià and Almodóvar. Like the peaceful transition to democracy itself, they embody Spain’s unexpected liberalization.

Money & Business

• Economist's Market View column examines dividends and the yawning gap between those of equities and bonds:
  

  Ten years ago, investors regarded companies that paid dividends as old-fashioned—they believed companies ought to use profits to expand their businesses). Today they seem grateful for any payouts they can get.

• BusinessWeek explores the diminishing luster of China's appeal to U.S. manufacturers:
  

  A new survey finds rising worries about product quality and intellectual-property theft. More U.S. companies are looking to Mexico and their own backyard

  
  

Sunday Roundup

Politics

• The Economist takes a sledge-hammer to the know-nothing brand of conservatism it fears America's Republican Party has fallen into.
  
  
• Jeffrey Goldberg, over at The Atlantic, does his best to assuage concerns of HRC as Secretary of State in, One Reason Hillary Could be Extraordinary at State.
  
  
• Photo journalism at its finest, Preeti Aroon at Foreign Policy magazine explores the truly underground economy of Gaza.

Business

• The NYT publishes a lengthy piece examining Citi's failure.
  
  
• Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and other noteworthy texts about Wall Street and its culture writes a fun, scary, and nostalgic piece for Portfolio Magazine that is worth reading.
  
  
• Daniel Gross explores why Tim Geitner is such a very Obama-esque and appropriate choice for Treasury Secretary at Slate.

Food & Wine

• With Thanksgiving upon us, Cooks Illustrated, my favorite food magazine of any sizable circulation publishes a Thanksgiving Survival Guide.
  
  
• Robert Parker, the wine critic everyone loves to hate, reviews the 2006 Chateauneuf du Papes (my pricey French wine of preference other than Pomerol) now on sale at BusinessWeek.