Christian Louboutin Asteroid 140 suede and patent-leather pumps, £945. Per The Guardian, Asma al-Assad is believed to have been shopping for a pair amid the daily slaughter of Syrians. An unforgettable image.
The Guardian’s special report, “The Assad Emails,” is here.
A Reminder
A brief note, to myself as much as anyone, to say that increasingly my Let’s Absorb This mind is being met far too early by my How Could I Share This mind. So that, for instance, three sentences into reading an article or essay, a shift takes place and my mind’s job is now to decide how this interesting, attention-worthy material just might be shared — here on this or another blog, or on Twitter or Facebook, or to co-workers. All before I have fully absorbed the piece in front of me. So I am reminding myself: Do your best to focus on absorbing — just you and the material, just like the old days — and later, when you’ve finished, when appropriate, share, share away.
Jeff Smith, about whose fall Jeannette Cooperman wrote during my St. Louis Magazine days, offers Blago a thorough, thoughtful, and memorable list of tips as the man heads off to prison. Among them:
You will have a nickname. It will probably be “Governor.” Accept that, but do so with deep humility….
Don’t change the TV channel, especially if women’s track is on, or “Ice Loves Coco.” There is an inscrutable yet stringent seniority-based regime when it comes to TV watching, and your celebrity does not entitle you to alter it in any way.
A behind-the-scenes post about how The New York Times Magazine chooses its covers (which are exceptional).
Greg Smith’s damning resignation letter, published in The New York Times:
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Related: “Margin Call” was quite good and similarly infuriating.
3/15/12 Update: Interesting follow-up from The Atlantic:
Greg Smith’s unflattering glimpse into Goldman Sachs’ corrupt culture triggered a financial blow to the firm Wednesday, as the company lost $2.15 billion of its market value, making Smith’s 1,283-word op-ed worth a whopping $1.675 million per word.
Great profile of Jonny Greenwood in today’s New York Times Magazine. Greenwood’s soundtrack for “There Will Be Blood” has been a favorite of mine on Rdio for the past year.
Joe Pollack Has Died
The hard-working, well-known, and friendly St. Louis dining, theater, and movie critic died Friday at age 81. The Post-Dipatch has an appropriately detailed obituary, and my friend George Mahe has a very nice post at his Relish blog, noting that Joe was at work the night before on five — five — movie reviews. I met Joe and his wife (and writing partner) Ann during my St. Louis Magazine days, when George brought both of them into the contributors’ family. We were lucky to have them. My condolences to the Pollack family.
By Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow, and published in The New York Review of Books. Lovely and sad.
Brilliant.
I can’t say enough about this episode of Radiolab:
We kick things off with a true escape artist — a man who’s broken out of jail more times than anyone alive. We try to figure out why he keeps running… and whether he will ever stop. Then, the ingeniously simple question that led Isaac Newton to an enormous intellectual breakthrough: why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? In the wake of Newton’s new idea, we find ourselves in a strange space at the edge of the solar system, about to cross a boundary beyond which we know nothing. Finally, we hear the story of a blind kid who freed himself from an unhappy childhood by climbing into the telephone system, and bending it to his will.
Memorable subjects, great narrative chronologies within segments, sharp and clever sound editing, and (as always) an infectious inquisitiveness from each of the Radiolabers we hear throughout. Listen online or download the mp3 and add it to your device.
Hey, that’s my father-in-law. Well done, Omer!
Part of The Atlantic’s “What I Read” series, which I’m always interested in. Two notable bits: His props for Twitter as the go-to, pre-any-kind-of-publication morning media spot (he’s taken to it in a big way) and his description of Newsweek as “very underrated.” That second bit surprised me — will have to look again.
Really like this post:
Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.
Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.
Spring Church, also known as the Burnt Church, in St. Louis’ Grand Center neighborhood. Built in 1884, it caught fire in March 2001. I took these during a visit earlier this week. (In 2008, Tamara and I joined many other St. Louisans in donating lamps to be part of an unforgettable arts installation on the site.)
Another very good (and very dispiriting) non-fiction piece from the Bosnian-American writer, published in Guernica’s January 2012 issue.
