Boston's Blizzard of '78
From many folks around the country we’re hearing reports of downed power lines and rising levels of snow accumulation. Exciting! Nothing gets us boiled like a good old fashioned blizzard. Granted, a winter storm poses significant risks to DSM: if the power’s gone, we’re gone. This makes us anxious and secretly happy. Of course, if power’s lost other means are available to keep your frenetic brains quenched. But we suspect you, like us, stalk your computer when it’s not cooperating: Damn, stupid thing! Oh, now it’s working. Anyway, while we’re concerned with snow there’s a Jihad being planned. Foreign Affairs shares the bad news. So, you think you understand music? The Times Online disagrees. Elsewhere, an author skewers the South’s racist past, a former Brooklynite considers how things are never as cool as they used to be, and the Morning News adds to the ever-expanding list of publications offering best book lists, which is great. But from our perspective, this inch of snow looks the same as any another. — Kevin Murphy
– In 1945, the United States faced a dire threat. The rising power of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism in Eastern Europe — and, soon enough, worldwide — represented a new enemy that imperiled postwar hopes for a peaceful and prosperous world. The United States was poorly equipped to comprehend, let alone respond to, this emerging global danger. — Jihad in Foreign Affairs
– None among the numerous such pitfalls is more hazardous than the idea of musical understanding. Ordinarily, when understanding something, such as a sentence, we are grasping its meaning. But while most people are clear that the phrase “to understand music” is not itself without meaning, agreement on what is understood in the musical case is less forthcoming. We might not hesitate to criticize an otherwise note-perfect performance for “lacking understanding”, but it might take us longer to specify what it was the player had failed to understand. — Music in the Times Online
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– Madison Smartt Bell has given himself an almost insurmountable challenge. A fictional protagonist should be someone readers can identify with. Though Bell pulls out all the literary stops, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest never quite becomes a character we sympathize with. After all, the real-life Forrest was a slave trader known for his violent temper and vulgar verbal explosions, a man who fought passionately to defend the Confederacy and would later help found the Ku Klux Klan. — Madison Bell in the Boston Globe
– Books must be novels (for the most part), and must have been published for the first time in English in 2009 (for the most part). Considerations included: our own reading experiences; recommendations from family and friends, readers, publishing folk, and TMN staff; critics’ opinions, from internet shoppers to prestigious names; prize-winners; other media groups’ best-of lists; sales records, high and low; too much hype or too little hype; independent publisher versus big bad media; authors’ reputations; authors’ previous participation in previous Tournaments; blurb quantity and quality; etc. — Book Lists in the Morning News
– In early October, after eleven years, two months and a handful of days in the same apartment, I moved out of Williamsburg. Perhaps you missed this somewhat-less-than-momentous news, but in my world, it was the stuff of banner headlines. It mattered more to me than the beginning of the baseball playoffs, the latest polls in the mayor’s race, or the fate of the public option. And at the end of my relocation, I was so exhausted that when I heard who won the Nobel Peace Prize, my only response was “why?” — Relocating in the Brooklyn Rail
Video: No Sleep Till Brooklyn
