The Implement
We got the gun out this past weekend. The double-barrel 12-gauge — a Parker Bros. classic — has felled many a deer and mourning dove. It was our great-grandfather’s, passed down to us through the generations. The harvest may not have been bountiful Saturday, but there is something to be said about spending a foggy morning in a lowland South Carolina plantation. A dear childhood friend rallied the dogs from his horseback. If we listened closely we could hear the whip cracking the air’s stillness. The whooping is hard to describe: high pitched, rising from the River Styx, madness. We’d sit absolutely motionless for an hour, each squirrel scurry increasing the tension, living on the potential. And then the snap — the cacophony of the dogs on a scent. Just like Dark Sky, which is always on the hunt for the stories you miss. Today, we retrieve Hannah Arendt, Scott Ritter on Afghanistan, the long narrative, email and Oberlin and undergrads. To borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd, “we’re just like you babe, we’re on the hunt.” – Andrew Geer
– There is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. Although he has taken a few lumps for playing politics with the White House, McChrystal has generally been sold to the American public as a “Zen warrior,” a counterinsurgency genius who, if simply left to his own devices, will be able to radically transform the ongoing debacle that is Afghanistan into a noble victory that will rank as one of the greatest political and military triumphs of modern history. — Afghanistan in Truthdig
The Big Woods
– Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship. — Arendt and Heidegger in Slate
– Gary Smith writes very long stories for a living. They run 8,000 words. He crafts four of them a year for Sports Illustrated. He is a throwback, a spinner of yarns in what we will call for the millionth time the Age of Twitter. Narrative these days competes against incrementalized information — data, chatter, noise. Smith doesn’t think he’s a dinosaur, but he does fear that the long-form narrative doesn’t quite work on a computer screen. — The Narrative and New Media in The Washington Post
Loading The Buck Shot
– On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven “Google alerts” on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. — The Tyranny of E-Mail in The New York Times
– On the 44th day of book tour I borrowed my friend’s car and drove south to Oberlin College, 2.5 hours down the 23 and across the 80/90 toll road. I have an iPhone now and I read short articles with the device perched against the steering wheel, swerving toward my destination. — The Book Tour in The Rumpus
Video: Stephen Elliot Reads from the Adderall Diaries
Photos courtesy of Jesse Lutz
