MoJo Blog Posts: riff

Mark Bittman and MoJo: A Tasty Recipe

By Steve Katz — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:27:36 -0800

When food writer (How to Cook Everything, Food Matters) and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman read our March/April "Let's Grow America!" special report on food security, he was so jazzed by it that he got in touch to offer his services to raise money for Mother Jones. How could we say no?

That's how a group of toque-hatted Mother Jones friends ended up at New York's Institute for Culinary Education last week, slicing, dicing, and eating dinner built off of a low-impact but immensely tasty menu that Mark prepared especially for the evening. From the first bite of chick pea fries to the last slurp of chocolate soy pudding with vanilla cream on top, our taste buds were in food heaven. You can view the photos of the evening on Flickr or in the slideshow below (see, anyone can look goofy in a paper hat).

Mark also took a few minutes to talk about his most recent book, Food Matters, which makes the connection between a healthy diet (less meat, more plants) and a healthy planet (less carbon, more icepack).

You can check out Mark's work here. And if you'd like to try your hand at the menu he prepared for Mother Jones, email us at bittmanrecipes@motherjones.com. We'll send you a PDF of the recipes.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Video: Sesame Street Turns 40, Goes Green

By Kiera Butler — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:02:49 -0800

Lordy, lordy, Sesame Street is turning 40. To celebrate four decades of educational muppet fun, this year its producers are introducing a curriculum called "My World is Green and Growing" designed to "create a love and understanding of the natural world." Below, Michelle Obama helps kids and Elmo plant a vegetable garden (pesticide free, natch):

HT Sierra Club.

Music Monday: A Tori Amos Christmas?

By Nikki Gloudeman — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Tori Amos
Midwinter Graces
Universal Republic

A Tori Amos Christmas album? Seriously?

That was my first thought when I opened Midwinter Graces, a new album out this week from the indie queen. The quirky, moody crooner seems like a strange fit for the wholesome, fuzzy holiday season. Plus, Christmas albums are usually crap (a fact MoJo staffers recently lamented at length).

But I should have known better than to to doubt the seditious songstress. Rather than recording syrupy holiday tunes, Amos has crafted a collection of covers and originals filled with whimsy and melancholy—the musical equivalent of spiked eggnog.

Some of her twists are subtle, like a rhythmic reimagining of the "Noel, Noel" refrain in "What Child, Nowell"—her mashup of "What Child Is This?" and "The First Noel"—or the backdrop of a drumbeat on "Emmanuel." Others are more pointed, like a lyrical personification of the ivy in "Holly, Ivy, and Rose," or gothic instrumentals in "Star of Wonder." Either way, there's a distinct sense that Amos wants to subvert the conventions of Christmas music, even as she pays them homage.

Amos also retains her lyrical trademark of precious poeticism: Black satin is what I wore / That, and our hearts left on the floor, she laments in "Pink and Glitter"; on "Winter's Carol," she muses The summer queen has been in darkness.

The only misstep is "Snow Angel," a leaden, cheesy ballad that reminds the listener what could've been had Amos chosen cliché over imagination. It's a good thing that didn't happen.

Music Monday: Johnny Cash—the Man in Black & White

By Michael Mechanic — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:30:00 -0800

Reinhard Kleist's brand-new graphic novel, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness (Abrams Books), opens with a vintage Caddy (license plate "HELL") barreling past a neon sign on the outskirts of Reno. Without a word, its surly driver—the Man in Black himself—makes his way to the strip, where he spots a short, wealthy, sleazy-looking man walking into an alley with a prostitute and proceeds to fill him with lead. In the scene's final panel, the killer is inside an armored bus, pulling up to the gates of Folsom Prison. Get it? I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die.

The Berlin-based artist has fun with this concept in his well-researched biography of the late country star, segueing into pen-and-ink depictions of Cash hits like "Big River," "Cocaine Blues," and "A Boy Named Sue" (which unbeknownst to me was penned by Shel Silverstein). Kleist uses a different, faux-tribal drawing style for "The Ballad of Ira Hayes"—a choice that reflects his interest in Cash's views on soldiers and war, an interest that also emerges in a studio scene with Bob Dylan.

If you caught the 2005 Cash biopic Walk the Line, with Joaquin Phoenix (the wrong actor as far as I'm concerned), you'll recognize the basic outline: The Depression-era upbringing amid cotton fields in Arkansas, where a neighbor kid teaches young J.R. Cash to play guitar. The horrible mishap that befalls his brother Jack. The Air Force service in Germany. The courtship and marriage to Vivian Liberto. The settling down in Memphis and forming a band. The record deal, tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, leading to a devastating addiction to uppers. The public disgraces. And, of course, the forbidden love with June Carter, whom he eventually marries.

But Kleist creates a fresh narrative, too, with side stories and small details you won't find in the film. Notably, he follows the character of Glen Sherley, a Folsom inmate who monitors Cash's career closely from behind bars and writes a song that Cash ends up using when he performs at Folsom in his big 1968 post-rehab comeback. In the book, as in the film, the Folsom sessions stand out as the dramatic peak. But there the movie ends. Kleist fast-forwards a quarter century, to 1994 and a solo recording session with rap producer Rick Rubin at Cash's cabin. By this time, Cash is an Old Man in Black, and through his chatter with Rubin we learn what became of Sherley after Cash helped get him sprung.

Artistically speaking, Kleist is a master of the genre who has spent much time studying Cash in all his facets—see his sketch gallery at the book's conclusion. He experiments with composition enough that the eye is never bored, and in just two pages of silent pictures, he manages to express the agony of drug withdrawal as viscerally as any words could. Kleist does his homework, taking seriously his duties not simply as a graphic artist but as the biographer catering to a newer generation of fans, those first drawn in by Cash's covers of artists like Danzig, Beck, and Soundgarden on Rubin's American Recordings and its sequel, Unchained. Like Rubin, and the late Cash himself, Kleist found a way to push an old story in a new direction.

Follow Michael Mechanic on Twitter.

Cool Chart: How Movie Stars Stack Up

By David Sparks — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:23:23 -0800

This story first appeared at Miller-McCune.

Metacritic.com is an acclaimed Web site that combines thousands of media reviews of entertainment offerings — movies, games, books and albums — into a Metascore, a sort of weighted average of critics' reviews that ranges from zero to 100. Analysis of just a small subset of the site's information shows the power of numbers to confirm — or defy — expectation.

The Actors
The colored horizontal bars on this chart present a graphical representation of the distribution of scores given to movies in which each of the listed actors appear. The numbers inside the bars represent the average of review scores for those movies; the actors listed are the top 50 and the bottom 10, in terms of those averages. Note that the reviews are primarily from the last decade; no consideration is given to the magnitude of the actor's role; and a high average rating could indicate acting skill, the ability to pick good projects (or good trilogies), reviewer bias or just luck. To the extent that the ordering of the actors appears generally reasonable, some unexpected placements may inspire a rethinking of subjective assessments (or, in the case of Viggo Mortensen's rating above Clint Eastwood, a good long laugh).

The Critics
This scatterplot shows 25 prolific movie critics in terms of the favorability with which they rate films, and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with those of other critics, scaled to reflect their volume of reviews written. If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average. If you are interested in an alternative perspective, Mick LaSalle's high standard deviation places him further from the critical pack than any of these peers. Reviews from both Michael Wilmington and Marc Savlov are so regularly and respectively positive and negative that they should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

The Movies
A "smoothed" plot of movie scores over time is depicted, highlighting the expected seasonal peaks in mid-summer and at the end of the year, along with the mid-winter and early autumn doldrums. Also listed are some of the more influential movies of their eras, in terms of number of reviews, along with their mean scores. Might the poorly reviewed summer of 2002 be attributed to releases delayed in the wake of 9/11? Does the relative lack of troughs from 2003 to 2006 reflect a real or imagined streak of high-quality films?

Baseball Finance Reform: Time to Cut A-Rod's Salary

By Ben Buchwalter — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:31:00 -0800

When the Philadelphia Phillies lost the World Series to the New York Yankees last night, I felt anger, heartbreak, frustration and the burning desire for a salary cap in Major League Baseball. Of course, I’m happy for those who saw their team win the World Series. But in the 108 years that the Yankees have been around, they’ve won the World Series a whopping 27 times. That's right: 25 percent of the time. And in the 126 years that the Phillies have been around, they've won twice. Yep, two percent of the time (rounded up).

And that's no mistake. In the past decades (and the foreseeable future) the Yanks have held a crushing financial advantage over all other major league franchises. This year, for example, the Yankees spent $208 million on player salaries, more than $60 million more than the second highest-paid team (The Mets) and nearly what the Phillies spent on their payroll ($111 million). A-Rod alone made $33 million this year, nearly a third of the entire Phillies payroll.

Baseball needs a salary cap. Think of it like campaign finance reform in politics. If the world’s richest donors could shovel all their cash to a single candidate, that person would flood the market with advertising and crush his or her opponent. But the government has deemed this unfair because it elevates the influence of rich voters above poor voters. Without a salary cap, the MLB elevates the hopes of fans in rich cities over fans in poor cities. Baseball is supposed to be about home team rivalries and anxious competition, not the size of each team's checkbook. Forgoing a salary cap allows rich teams like the Yankees to swallow up promising talent when it matures, which is too un-American for America's favorite past time.

More on the "Lady Bloggers" Hullaballoo

By Marian Wang — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:54:09 -0800

So given all the discussion generated by my "Lady Bloggers" post last week, I thought it would be wise to throw out a little reminder: The whole point of my post was to share a new statistic, to ask some pointed questions, and to say that if female bloggers aren't equally represented in the blogosphere, that's something that needs to change as more and more folks get their information from blogs.

After the story hit, female blogger Sarah Posner brilliantly suggested the hashtag #followwomenbloggers, and hundreds of people pitched in with suggestions for excellent female bloggers to follow. Several of you also had questions for me, and I've responded to a few of the main points in the comments section of the original post. In case you missed it, I'm reposting my response below:

Q: Why'd you pick a photo of Ana Marie Cox with cleavage?

A: I didn't pick it, and even if I had, now who's paying attention to the boobage? Do her breasts somehow undermine her legitimacy? Hell no, if you ask me, Ana Marie Cox can wear whatever Ana Marie Cox wants. Even if I didn't pick the picture, I fully stand behind my editor's choice. What's wrong with the picture? In my book, women shouldn't have to hide away their biology to be taken seriously. (Bonus: Ana's a MoJo alum.)

Q: Why 'lady' bloggers? What about 'gentlemen' bloggers?

A: If you'd rather me call you a homosapien who blogs and possesses two X chromosomes, I can. I just thought lady was a little shorter for the headline, which is the only place I used that term. I do hear your point, though, and I realize that "lady" has very traditional connotations, but as a female blogger myself, I certainly don't blog while sitting in Victorian dress, sitting sidesaddle and sipping Earl Grey. (Okay, maybe I still drink Earl Grey.) But I didn't envision any of you "lady bloggers" out there doing that either. Isn't there a point at which we can reclaim and reappropriate words? And if we're going to get all technical, it's not "women bloggers" either—it's female bloggers.

Q: This is bullshit and sexist, women are blogging.

A: Given that I quoted a female blogger in this piece, there's a high likelihood that I'm aware women are blogging. I never made any assertion that there are no female bloggers out there, but if you're disagreeing with the report and asserting that female bloggers make up more than a third of the blogosphere, I'd be happy to update the story to include whatever statistics you have. I'm aware that Technorati's study is hardly comprehensive—it's hard to have comprehensive, absolutely accurate statistics on the blogosphere—and that's why I chose to pose it as a question. To be honest, when I first wrote this blog entry, I thought it was kind of a throwaway post because I felt I wasn't really answering my own question. Apparently, based on your comments here, my very act of asking the question said more than I was aware of, but in any case, I'm glad it generated discussion because that's kind of the point of blogging.

Q: How can you even talk about women bloggers without taking a look at X blog? That you failed to do so tells me you didn't dig very deep.

A: This blog post isn't a comprehensive report. I'm absolutely sure I didn't get every blog out there, or cover every angle. It's a 600 word piece—if it got all of you to converse with each other, it served its purpose. It's not an expose (although Mother Jones has plenty of that too. Check us out on your news stands).

Thanks for reading, and keep the discussion going!

I'll Karate Chop Your Christian Book if You Don't Stop Pimping My Culture

By Marian Wang — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:30:00 -0800

Update: This afternoon the authors posted an apology on their Deadly Viper blog. So far they've gotten some very forgiving responses in the comments section. I guess I won't be needing karate lessons after all? That's a relief.

Zondervan, the world's leading Bible publisher, just released a book called Deadly Viper Character Assasins: A Kung Fu Survival Guide for Life and Leadership.

I'll let that name sink in for a moment. A KUNG FU SURVIVAL GUIDE. It's written by Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite, two people who must understand a form of Chinese even Chinese people can't make sense of, because the cover and website of their book features Chinese characters that read like total gibberish... because they are. They were selected because they "looked compositionally cool."

Seriously? At least the kids at the mall who get various Chinese characters tattooed on their ankles still want to know what the words mean. To me, there's just a total lack of recognition that Chinese characters are part of an actual language, and more than a pretty decoration. Or that the use of an stereotypical Asian ninja theme has little to do with the content of their book, which is Christian leadership. Or that this dubbed-over kung fu video made to promote the book is just downright offensive. Or that kung fu is Chinese and ninjas are Japanese, and those are two totally different cultures.

What's clear is that their target audience is not Chinese-speaking folks. If I picked up a book at Borders with random words on the cover like "Happy, Sister, Tree" I would PROBABLY put it down without buying it. So clearly, this product is not marketed to the people whose culture it so gratuitously portrays. But when North Park Theological Seminary professor Soong-Chan Rah reached out to the book's authors with his critique, he received the following response from co-author Mike Foster:

i realize you have an agenda.
i realize you see what you want to see.
im saddened that you are offended and angered by us shooting a video in a japanese garden.
not much i can do here except say good luck in life and what ever you may be trying to accomplish.

btw the kanji on the cover say ninja. warrior. assassin.

peace . . . m.

(What's going on with that last line, by the way? Is that some kind of fortune cookie speak?)

Now I have to admit that I was hesitant to blog this, because I was afraid it would heap more hate on religion as a whole, and that refrain is a tired one. At the same time, it's really frustrating to see your culture pimped out in the holy name of Christian book sales.

So Zondervan, you really want your name on this? This isn't the first time that the Christian company has published racially insensitive materials. It's just that on the other occasions, the authors of the books had enough sense to apologize. Several Asian American bloggers have now written posts and open letters protesting the publishing giant's latest cultural faux pas. But so far, no response. If you feel so compelled, you can add your voice to the mix by contacting the authors or Zondervan's PR team. Just please... do it with a little more grace than Mike Foster's "good luck in life" signoff.

Monster Mashups Shine Light on Government

By Emily Badger — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:40:51 -0800

This story first appeared on the Miller-McCune website.

The gushing effluvia of spreadsheets and thick reports that flow from government are dissected, reconstituted and displayed by a dedicated band of coders.

Clay Johnson pulled out his iPhone to illustrate the kind of mashup that's possible when coders get their hands on data churned out by government, whole reams of transactions on where federal money is spent, who gets it and how it's used.

On the screen was a live view up 19th Street in northwest Washington, the moving picture overlaid with small bubbles representing projects on this very block paid for by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

"It blows your mind, right?" Johnson asked. "This is the tip of the iceberg."

What if, he suggests, an application could track all government spending on the federal, state, district and city level? What if it were able to personalize the data by inputting the taxes you paid this year to calculate — to the cent — what your contribution was to this road you're walking down right now?

The Recovery "augmented reality" mashup was created by James Turk, a developer in the Sunlight Labs project that Johnson directs. Their experiment is an arm of the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government advocacy group Miller-McCune first mentioned in the January/February 2009 issue of the magazine.

Johnson spoke about the labs outside a coffee shop near the Sunlight office, today a mess of boxes and packing material as the growing foundation moves into a larger D.C. home.

Some of the organization's other projects turn dense government data into vivid graphics and charts laymen can appreciate. Someone, though, has to make the data available to the coders to get it to citizens. And that is where Sunlight Labs comes in. Today, it is an open-source community of more than 1,000 developers from across the Internet hacking away on data sets newly available through sites like Recovery.gov, devising interesting ways to parse and present them.

"[Sunlight Labs] now is, I think, where I've always wanted it to be," Johnson said, "which is out of our control."

Now largely run by the community itself, Sunlight Labs has created a kind of online app store (a free one, that is) for open government, with about 100 apps that do things like track which senators are most likely to block legislation using a filibuster (the aptly named app "filibusted"), or to mash up any two data sets off data.gov ("datamasher"). Both were winners of the labs' "Apps for America" contests.

"Programmers think very rationally," Johnson said, "and I think a lot of programmers want to basically digitize their government so that it behaves to them more rationally."

The project predates Barack Obama's arrival in Washington with his Gov2.0 pledges to make the town more transparent. But opening up the current administration, Johnson said, isn't less frustrating than opening up the notoriously tight-lipped previous one. "It's just different frustrating," he said.

"Here's a good example: dating," he explained, laughing at his own analogy. "Who would you rather be courting? You go after someone and say, 'Do you want to go out?' And he or she says, 'No.' Or, you go after someone and say, 'Do you want to go out"? 'Yeah sure, maybe some day.' That's what the current administration does to an extent."

A lot of the data the government does provide now is messy in a man-made way, riddled with typos a computer can't correct, or presented in a format — like PDF files — a developer can't readily work with. And so Sunlight Labs works not just to invent possibilities for developers, but also to show government what's possible with a more dedicated effort — like the mashup of Recovery Act spending in your neighborhood, on your iPhone.

As the administration should appreciate, such a tool blunts at least some of the criticism that people can't see where that money has gone.

White House Poetry Jam Awesomesauce

By Nick Baumann — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:58:23 -0800

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted a "White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word" back in May. Videos from the event are now online, and it's pretty clear that the highlight was Lin-Manuel Miranda. You may know Miranda from his musical In The Heights, which he starred in and wrote. (In The Heights won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008. I can assure you that it is great.) Anyway, Miranda has ridiculous, sick-nasty flow and can write a great song about pretty much anything. In this particular case, it was onetime Treasury Secretary, dead white man, and all-around badass Alexander Hamilton (the guy on the $10 bill) that got Miranda's creative juices flowing:

If this doesn't get the kids jazzed up for some musical theater, I don't know what will.