Mustafa used the van’s ignition key as a crude knife and managed to get the package open. Inside, in a slim plastic case, was a deck of playing cards. Each card bore a picture of a man’s face, captioned with an English transliteration of his name and a job title. Mustafa recognized many of the names and faces–almost all of them were prominent Baath Union members–but the job titles were whimsical.
The Mirage by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage” starts as a police procedural and political thriller set in a topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world: a world where the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in Baghdad on 11/9/2001 by a group of American Christian fundamentalists has plunged the United Arab States into a War Against Terror, embroiling it with the failed states and theocracies in North America. It’s a world where the Jewish state was established after World War II in occupied Bavaria, and where Israel and the United Arab States are allied against European and American Christian terrorists. Many of the transformations are broad and obvious, some are subtle and intriguing, and for about 200 pages the conceit holds together well. Ruff’s characters, particularly the Homeland Security agent Mustafa, are well-rounded and interesting, not merely plot devices, and the main characters’ conflicts rise as much from personal history as from the geopolitical world Ruff has created.

But the second half, with a massive expository dump by CIA agent David Koresh (just one of many recastings that seem satirical though not played for obvious laughs) and a too-literal deus ex machina, strains the suspension of disbelief a bit too much. Certainly a major theme of the book is the eruption of alternate realities into one another–Mustafa has begun to find artifacts from our own world, like New York Times articles about 9/11 and a set of the Saddam Hussein “playing cards” issued during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq–but the eruptions become increasingly jarring and crudely drawn as the story winds down. It may have been a more satisfying read if it had ended with the mystery unrevealed, or if it had stretched to twice its length with more time to develop the alternate world and wrap it up more convincingly.

Despite this flaw, though, I found “The Mirage” well worth the read: it’s fast-paced and action-packed at the same time that it raises interesting questions, a combination that is fairly unusual.

Eating in the field can have the same dislocated, heightened quality that accompanies foreign travel. Far from the comforts of home, you find yourself cooking with people who you’ve only ever seen hunched over a lab bench. (You mean, they eat, too?).

Read the full story …

A Profile of London by A.A. Gill

If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Read the full story …

David Simon | Welcome to Florida. Beware of gunmen standing their ground

That these laws sailed through legislatures and were signed by governors is indicative of a craven national culture, a panicked bunker mentality that now approaches the pathological.

Read the full story …

Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview.

“They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he observes, “For something that I would do for free.”

Read the full story …

The Impasse: When the “truth wins” assumption fails.

When we convey facts to an audience that doesn’t want to hear them, we come to an impasse. The stronger the pre-existing belief, the stronger the motivation to dismiss the contrary evidence and the journalists who convey it. And there’s not much journalists can do about this.

Read the full story …

Cindy Sherman’s Vintage Notecard

Fair Deceiver: I did not know until last night that you had a glass eye.

Read the full story …

How to End This Depression by Paul Krugman

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

Read the full story …

Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms – Robert Reich

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Read the full story …

Pulitzer Prize Winning German Photographer Horst Fass Dies – SPIEGEL ONLINE

“Horst was one of the biggest talents of our time,” AP’s editor in chief Kathleen Carroll said. He was “a fearless photographer and a courageous journalist.”

Read the full story …

Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath? – NYTimes.com

Then last spring, the psychologist treating Michael referred his parents to Dan Waschbusch, a researcher at Florida International University. Following a battery of evaluations, Anne and Miguel were presented with another possible diagnosis: their son Michael might be a psychopath.

Read the full story …

The beauty of an apology is that everyone wins because it reveals not only who we are, but who we hope we are.

Read the full story …

Riding the Subway with Stanley Kubrick | mcnyblog

As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.

Read the full story …

Brett Keller » Hunger Games survival analysis

The only statistically significant effect (at the traditional and arbitrary cutoff of P<0.05) comes from the Gamemakers’ rating variable. The career dummy variable just misses the cutoff (P=0.065) and might be significant if we had a larger sample size and saw similar trends in the data, but effect is in the wrong direction: holding other things constant (sex, age, and Gamemakers’ rating), Careers do less well than non-Careers! Of course, this only happens in this analysis because Peeta and Katniss (but mostly Katniss) are awesome.

Read the full story …

The Romneys’ Mexican History

This state of feeling in between, I would soon learn, defines nearly every aspect of Mormon life in the old colonies. The settlers’ descendants, numbering several hundred in all, keep alive a culture that’s always been caught between Mexico and the United States, between the past and the present, between stability and crisis.

Read the full story …

The Port Huron Statement: Still Radical at 50 — In These Times

To mark the 50th anniversary of Port Huron–and what we hope is the dawn of an enduring youth movement–In These Times asked 14 activists, ranging in age from 21 to 72, including three people who attended the Port Huron convention, to reflect on what that statement offers us today. Their responses follow, preceded by the portion of the statement they found significant.

Read the full story …

Ax-Man: What Surplus Should Taste Like

That taste, for the record, is a metallic, shop-class tang.

Read the full story …

The Things He Carried by Jeffrey Goldberg

I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport.

Read the full story …

This spring creek was not one of the most eminent Montana spring creeks, not Nelson Spring Creek and not Armstrong, not the sort of place where you could plunk down twenty-five dollars per rod per day for the privilege of casting your fly over large savvy trout along an exclusive and well-manicured section of water. On this creek you fished free or not at all. I fished free, because I knew the two people inside the house and, through them, the wonderful surly old rancher who owned the place.

Read the full story …

Forest Service may blow up frozen cows in cabin

“Obviously, time is of the essence because we don’t want them defrosting,” Segin said.

Read the full story …

Locals fear mounting body count in idyllic corner of GTA – The Globe and Mail

That brings the number of bodies found dumped or left for dead in the Caledon area to eight in the last five years. It’s a rate double that of the much larger rural Durham on the other side of the GTA, and it’s a tally that is bringing unwelcome notoriety, and more than a little anxiety, to this quiet area of forested hills and horse stables.

Read the full story …

The Bathroom Library

“I’m convinced that a lot of serious thinking has always been done in bathrooms, and that it is an irreparable loss to humanity that the names and ideas of these philosophers are not known. No doubt Pascal was right when he said that most evils in life arose from “man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”"

Read the full story …

The Secret Life of Alan Z. Feuer

“I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to discover who he already was.”

Read the full story …

Get it while you can–I think you’ll enjoy it!

So, whether it was Socrates complaining about books or the great comic book scares of the 1950s when four-color printing came about, every time there is a new technology that allows more and different culture to be created, the guardians of the status quo announce that civilization is over. – Eoin Nash of Soft Skull, Cursor, Red Lemonade, Small Demons

Read the full story …

Amazon Low Prices Disguise a High Cost

Amazon has used its market power to bully and dictate. It leaned on the Independent Publishers Group in recent months for better terms and when those negotiations didn’t work out, Amazon simply removed the company’s almost 5,000 e-books from its virtual shelves.

Read the full story …

A cartoonist paints a wiggly line, with help from friends

It’s rare to see a new strip targeted for newspapers, as opposed to a pure webcomics offering, as the precipitous decline of newspapers’ revenue and profits have led them to shed comics like ballast.

Read the full story …

In 1680, as Moroccan troops besieged the short-lived British city of Tangier, Irish soldiers manning the walls resorted to speaking as Gaeilge, in Irish, for fear of being understood by English-born renegades in the Sultan’s armies. To this day, the Irish abroad use the same tactic in discussing what should go unheard, whether bargaining tactics or conversations about taxi-drivers’ haircuts.

Read the full story …

I remember you – Roger Ebert’s Journal

That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

Read the full story …

E-book price-fixing: Amazon is the real bad guy.

The DoJ’s action effectively robs publishers of the ability to price their own products and robs other retailers of any hope of competing effectively with Amazon. Hence the DoJ has all but guaranteed a future in which readers end up with fewer well-edited books—both physical and electronic—and in which writers feel less free to speak against concentrated power.

Read the full story …

How Much Should Sex Matter?

On the Internet, we frequently interact with people without knowing their gender. Some people place high value on controlling what information about them is made public, so why do we force them, in so many situations, to say if they are male or female?

Read the full story …

Why don’t Americans walk more? The crisis of pedestrianism.

In other words, not to be on a horse, flying or otherwise, was to be utterly unremarkable and mundane. To this day, Ronkin was intimating, the word pedestrian bears not only that slightly alien whiff, but the scars of condescension.

Read the full story …

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life, and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Read the full story …

A Tribute to Marie Colvin

It was like a scene from a Graham Greene novel. Marie, except for the fact she was female, was very much a Greene character: wry, nicotine stained, almost ludicrously brave.

Read the full story …

Why On Earth Am I Sympathizing With Santorum? – Andrew Sullivan

I despise what the GOP has become. But it is what it is. And Santorum is its logical leader. Let this party stand up and be counted. Romney would shroud it in bullshit and blather – while not deviating from it a scintilla. If he won the nomination and lost the general campaign, the GOP would simply blame it on his lack of “real conservatism”. And we’d be back where we started. With Santorum, we’d finally get to test whether that “real conservatism” is indeed the future of the GOP or what I think it is – a reactionary form of madness.

Read the full story …

‘The Lifespan of a Fact,’ by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal – NYTimes.com

From D’Agata’s first sentence, which says that at the time of Levi’s death there were “34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas,” Fingal detects trouble. D’Agata has supplied The Believer with a source suggesting the city had just 31 such clubs. Fingal asks D’Agata how he arrived at “34.” D’Agata replies in dubious fashion: “Because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31.’ ”

Read the full story …

Self-Publishers Stuff Nook, Kindle Comics Stores With Porn | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

It’s a rule of the Internet. Stop editing and moderating, just for a minute, and everything will turn to porn and spam.

Read the full story …

Did Life Start in a Pond, Not Oceans? : Discovery News

“The basic question is whether the observed high potassium-sodium ratio reflect the historical environment in which life originated or underwent early evolution, or instead reflects some underlying chemical necessity, such as better functioning of certain cellular components, such as RNA or protein enzymes in a high potassium environment,” Harvard Medical School biologist Jack Szostak wrote in an email to Discovery News.

The new research provides a possible explanation for the potassium-sodium mismatch. Scientists say the composition of inorganic ions in all modern cells matches the chemistry of geothermal vapor condensate — not the ocean.

Read the full story …

Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Antiwar Critics Forgotten on Oscar Night | TomDispatch

We tend to think of wars as occasions for heroism, and in a narrow, simple sense they can be. But a larger heroism, sorely lacking in Washington this last decade, lies in daring to think through whether a war is worth fighting at all.

Read the full story …

My Story in Five Faces by Connie Schultz

In my early 30s, i copied a George Orwell quotation and tucked it into my wallet: “At age 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

Read the full story …

Get off my lawn by Sally Adee

Why don’t we get to choose exactly what level of technology we feel comfortable using?

Read the full story …

The originality of the species by Ian McEwan

In modern times, we have come to take for granted in art – literature as well as painting and cinema – the vital and enduring concept of originality. Despite all kinds of theoretical objections, it remains central to our notion of quality. It carries with it an idea of the new, of something created in a godlike fashion out of nothing. “Perfectly unborrowed”, as Coleridge said of Wordsworth’s poetry. Originality is inseparable from a powerful sense of the individual, and the boundaries of this individuality are strongly protected.

Read the full story …

Children’s memories: Toddlers remember better than you think

The word story is important here. Children are learning how to organize memories in a narrative, and in doing so, they are learning the genre of memory

Read the full story …

My hypothesis is that short stories are uniquely suited to the digital age. I contend that there’s a market for small, portable stories, reasonably priced, that people can read and enjoy in the minutes we carve out for ourselves from our over-busy days. There are details to work out still–how the stories are delivered, how they’re consumed, what price is reasonable–and that’s part of what this experiment is about.

For the first part of the experiment, I’ll be digging into my publishing history. I’ve had about two dozen stories published in small literary journals, both print and online; these are stories that have been selected and edited by smart and talented people, so there’s little risk to the reader that you’ll be spending money on unpolished, not-ready-for-prime-time work. If the experiment continues, I’ll probably introduce some stories written specifically for this project; I have plans for a series of thematically linked stories that is a perfect fit for this experiment.

This experiment will work best if it’s a two-way conversation between readers and writer. Let me know what you think: Are the stories priced correctly? Was it easy to get and read the story? Having tried one story, will you try others? You can send your feedback via the comments on this site, at the Cartwheel Media site, or via Twitter.

You can download the first story, “Pieces,” here:

Pieces

A short story about memory, time, and the things we lose. Originally published in Small Spiral Notebook online, January 2005.

    

Winnie’s breed does not have royal roots, but her lineage is fierce. It dates to what some consider the finest feat in dog-and-human history, a 1925 race to deliver lifesaving diphtheria serum to icebound Nome, Alaska. The event gripped the nation and later became an inspiration for the Iditarod race.

Read the full story …

War of 1812 important because it kept out U.S. politics – and Snooki

Americans see it as a war that produced their national anthem. Canadians see it as a war which saved them from American assimilation and preserved them from American politics, gun laws and shared citizenship with Snooki of the Jersey Shore

Read the full story …

The Mysteries of the Suicide Tourist

The glamour of New York can play a role. Just as the city’s glittering, outsize reputation attracts many people for happy reasons, it attracts others for tragic ones. People who are suicidal may want to die in a way that gets them attention they felt they never got when they were alive, says Herbert Hendin, a New York–based psychiatrist and the president of Suicide Prevention International. By this logic, New York can be the perfect stage.

Read the full story …

n+1: Listening to Books

I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears, and three years later I still associate certain spots along the Charles with scenes from the novel’s Dorlcote Mill. I also remember exactly where along the Weeks Footbridge Lucy Deane marveled at how beautiful Maggie Tulliver looks in shabby clothes. I think of it whenever I pass that spot, which means I think of it most days.

Read the full story …

Edward Luttwak reviews ‘The Iliad by Homer’ translated by Stephen Mitchell · LRB 23 February 2012

At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction; and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’

Read the full story …

Picasso’s Guernica in a car showroom

“They didn’t know what the hell else they could do to make people listen and understand, but they thought this might help, and so they did it with great conviction.”

Read the full story …

Contraception’s Con Men by Garry Wills

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden. Catholic authorities themselves say it is a matter of “natural law,” over which natural reason is the arbiter—and natural reason, even for Catholics, has long rejected the idea that contraception is evil. More of that later; what matters here is that contraception is legal, ordinary, and accepted even by most Catholics. To say that others must accept what Catholics themselves do not is bad enough. To say that President Obama is “trying to destroy the Catholic Church” if he does not accept it is much, much worse.

Read the full story …

E-books Can’t Burn by Tim Parks

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

Read the full story …

A Boy Who Was ‘Like a Flower’ – Anthony Shadid’s Pulitzer Prize reporting

If the Americans are intent on liberation, why are innocent people dying? If they want to attack the government, why do bombs fall on civilians? How can they have such formidable technology and make such tragic mistakes?

Read the full story …

Why libraries matter

We have amazing potential power, but without concerted effort I’m afraid it will be wasted. It will look better to save 10 dollars a year per person in taxes instead of funding community computer workshops, and childhood literacy programs, and community gardens. All the while we play desperate catch-up, trying to get a hold on ebooks, and liscensing out endless sub-quality software for meeting room reservations and computer sign-ups and all this other rentier software capitalism instead of developing free and open source solutions and providing small systems with the expertise to use them. Our amazing power is squandered as we cut our staff, fail to attract skilled and diverse talent, and act as a band aid to the mounting social ills caused by slash and burn governance in the name of low taxes and some nebulous idea of freedom that seems to equate with living in a good society but not paying your share for it.

Read the full story …

Another March to War? | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

We have a similar gentleman’s code, a “Westernized industrial power” code if you will, that operates the same way. In other words, our newspapers and TV stations may blather on a thousand times a day about attacking Iran and bombing its people, but if even one Iranian talks about fighting back, he is being “aggressive” and “threatening”; we can impose sanctions on anyone, but if the sanctioned country embargoes oil shipments to Europe in response, it’s being “belligerent,” and so on.

Read the full story …

Dining After ‘Downton Abbey’: Why British Food Was So Bad For So Long : The Salt : NPR

Plenty of working-class Brits were domestic servants back then. When World War I came, a lot of these skilled servants — and their masters — marched off to the trenches. Many never returned.

Read the full story …

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred – Marilynne Robinson

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own.

Read the full story …

Cormac McCarthy, Quantum Copy Editor

The novelist’s corrections appear to be more literary than scientific. In addition to suggested some rephrasing, Mr. Krauss, said, Mr. McCarthy “made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.” (A quick digital search through Mr. McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy” and several other novels finds no examples of the offending punctuation.)

Read the full story …

Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain

What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.

Read the full story …