March 2015 Acquisitions

Books:
Ed Burbaker and Sean Phillips, The Fade Out, Vol. 1, 2015.
P. D. James, The Children of Men, 2006.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1990.
Mary Gehman, The Free People of Color of New Orleans: An Introduction, 2009.
Jason Goodwin, The Snake Stone, 2008.
Jeff Kinney, The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary: How Greg Heffley Went Hollywood, 2012.
Harvey Kubernik, Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles, 1956-1972, 2014.
Joe R. Lansdale et al, Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo, 1994.
Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, 1961, 1990.
Stan Lee et al, Essential Spider-Man, Vol. 7, 2005.
Stan Lee et al, Essential Spider-Man, Vol. 8, 2007.
Donna Leon, Drawing Conclusions, 2012.
Henning Mankell, The Return of the Dancing Master, 2005.
Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man, 2012.
Mark Millar et al, Kingsman: The Secret Service, 2015.
Doug Moench and Kelley Jones, Batman: Haunted Gotham, 2009.
Jimmy Palmiotti et al, All-Star Western, Vol. 6: End of the Trail, 2015.
Jimmy Palmiotti et al, Batwing, Vol. 5: Into the Dark, 2015.
Jimmy Palmiotti et al, Jonah Hex: No Way Back, 2011.
Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace, 2011.
Rachel Renee Russell, Dork Diaries 8: Tales from a Not-So-Happily Ever After, 2014.
Jim Starlin and Marv Wolfman, Batman: A Death in the Family, 1989.
Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, 2013.


DVDs:
Big Hero 6, 2014.
Superman II, 1980.

"But He Had Never Been Immortalized in a Comic Book"

"'So I started walking a lot in New York, not only in Manhattan, but in Queens, in Brooklyn, even in the Bronx.'

"Wandering the city, 'I discovered the world done by Moses,' Mr. Christin said. 'And I thought, "It is so visual, I will treat it like a graphic novel, not an article, because there are so many places I can show."' The book, illustrated by a French artist who lives in Chile, Olivier Balez, tells Moses's story in lushly nostalgic sepia-toned colors: the bridges and beaches and pools and parkways, the clubby back rooms where deals were done, the Batman-worthy lair on Randalls Island where he plotted his campaigns."

Andy Newman in The New York Times talks with Pierre Christin about Christin's Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City, a graphic biography.

"A Philosophy That Wedded Capitalism to Christianity"

"'Spiritual mobilization' is his effort to recruit other ministers to the cause. So he is serving, in many ways, as a frontman for a number of corporate leaders. His main sponsors are Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, they all heavily fund this organization. But what Fifield sets out to do is recruit other ministers to his cause. Within the span of just a decade's time, he has about 17,000 so-called minister representatives who belong to the organization who are literally preaching sermons on its Christian libertarian message to their congregations, who are competing in sermon contest[s] for cash prizes and they're doing all they can in their local communities to spread this message that the New Deal is essentially evil, it's a manifestation of creeping socialism that is rotting away the country from within. Instead they need to rally around business leaders and make common cause with them to defend what they call 'the American way of life.'"


Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air interviews Kevin M. Kruse about his new book One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America.




"Despite the argument Kruse makes beginning with his subtitle, 'corporate America' played no significant role in conceiving any of these initiatives"


Michael Kazin reviews the book in The New York Times.

"Something We Can Hold in Our Hands Is, Simply, a More Complete Visceral Experience"

"I miss the old Virgin Megastore in Union Square, which shut down in 2009, and the visceral experience of flipping through the stacks, discovering new albums through means so simple as their interesting cover art or, even better, via new-release listening stations equipped with a skip-track button and germy headphones. If the label sent you the record, spending the time opening all that packaging—ugh, the impossible-to-open sticky tape on jewel cases—was still an investment, like reading a book in the library.

"Now I discover most new music on Soundcloud and Tumblr, and while it's infinitely more convenient insofar as it does not require me to physically part myself from my laptop, it doesn't feel quite as adventuresome."

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in The New York Times laments the decline of physical music media.

"An Act of Jubilant Resurrection"

"During those years of rebounding—and unbeknownst to Christopher—a VHS bootleg of the two-hour-long 54 rough cut began to circulate among film geeks, and, despite being distorted by its poor technical quality, it became the focus of a word-of-mouth campaign: This movie was really good. Petitions to Miramax to release 54 as Christopher intended it began to appear online, and in 2008, the New York LGBT film festival Outfest had a 'secret screening' of the director’s cut—its first public showing since the Long Island test-screening ten years before. 'They sold out immediately,' says Christopher of the Outfest airing. 'There’s been an appetite for this cut for a long, long time.'"


Louis Jordan at New York reports on the return of the 1998 movie 54.

"Master Architect Constructs Most Structurally Innovative Pile Of Dirty Dishes To Date"

"Broess went on to say that the lattice of food-covered silverware atop the pile demonstrated that his roommate also had full command of aesthetic details."


From The Onion.

"For George Orwell, There Was Nothing Pro-American About Animal Farm"

"'Halas and Batchelor had to compete in the world market with Disney, so a few cartoon gags were introduced into the film to lighten its heaviness, and I believe that whatever the CIA's influence might have been, the choice for an upbeat ending came out of the animator's wish to succeed with the audience. There were movies of the period like the live film, My Son John (1952), which attacked the menace of communism head-on in a contrived and obvious fashion, so I guess anything is possible. If Orwell had lived longer, I suspect he would have vetoed any effort to translate his work into such a film.'"


Karl Cohen in a 2003 Guardian article recounts the production of the 1954 animated version of Animal Farm.

"Even the Triangle Workers Got One Day a Week Off"

"The men who owned the Triangle factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, didn't want 146 of the people who worked for them to die in agony. But they also never bothered to supply their factories with effective firefighting equipment of any kind because that cost money—and because they had a history of suspicious, end-of-the-season fires that conveniently burned up their heavily insured, surplus cloth.
"Public unions could have put policemen and firemen out of the Tammany machine's reach. Private unions could have protected the women working at the Triangle factory. Even in safer times, the need endures to guard workers from the worse tendencies of government and business."


Kevin Baker at The New Republic connects the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to today's labor issues.

"We Ought to Remind Ourselves of What a Truly Dreadful Idea the Flat Tax Is"

"When politicians take a position that carries with it unusual political risk, it's a good sign that they're sincere about it. And all these Republicans genuinely believe it would be good for America if rich people paid less in taxes, while everyone else paid more. Just so we have that clear."


Paul Waldman at The American Prospect looks at Republican fondness for a flat tax.

"Nation's Money Constantly Disgusted By What Americans Doing With It"

"'I should be making a down payment on a house or helping somebody go to college, not paying for cross-country airfare so some moron can go to Bonnaroo,' said another portion of money, explaining how it can barely go a month anymore without being used to book a party bus. 'Back when I was a business loan, I used to hope that maybe someday I'd be the seed capital for the world's next big tech startup, or even just a respectable family store, but instead they loaned me out to a guy who just opened his neighborhood's fifth vape shop.'
"'Thinking about it still makes me feel filthy,' the money added."


From The Onion.

"Full Employment Was a Lucky Exception"

"To Taylor, calling full employment the general state and allowing one unlucky exception turns Keynes upside down. And look where this confusion has brought us, he adds. Take the current eurozone disaster. For two decades, the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels, the German Council of Economic Experts, and a chorus of others, branded Germany, the 'sick man of Europe,' as suffering from a sclerotic supply side: rigid labor unions, impediments to layoffs, a burdensome welfare state. But German labor costs to produce output sank steadily, and Germany generated huge trade surpluses—hardly signs of a sclerotic supply side. Yet growth has barely averaged 1 percent a year since 2000.
"The problem? Weak demand, according to Taylor. The chorus ignored demand because the mainstream says it cannot affect long-run growth and employment. But it does. Now the same chorus is telling southern Europe to institute 'reforms' like Germany. But if the German model doesn't work well in Germany, how can it work in Greece, Italy, or Spain? A misguided idea is undermining the European Union itself."

Jonathan Schlefer in The Boston Globe looks at John Maynard Keynes's influence on current economists.

Black Power Mixtapes

"But this does not lessen the responsibility of scholars to be exacting, especially when they self-consciously pursue their studies in order to advance social change, as the progressive revisionists of black power do. The art of social transformation is demanding. Those who portray the past for instruction and inspiration must not shrink before its imperatives, lest today’s activists learn the wrong lessons."


Randall L. Kennedy in the Boston Review criticizes recent books about Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panthers.

"What It's Done to His City"

" A new brand of dot-com millionaires and generally Silicon Valley money have moved into San Francisco with bags full of cash and no manners."


Jeffrey Brown at the PBS Newshour interviews Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

"The Party of Tough Luck, Pal"

"So where is this coming from? The class traitors guiding the Republican Party, and the harsh new federal budget unveiled this week, usually promote their policies using personal anecdotes. Their condescension toward the poor springs from their own narratives: They are virtuous because they made it, or vice versa. Those who haven't made a similar leap are weaklings. It's a variant of Mitt Romney's view that 47 percent of Americans are moochers. Stripped to its essence, it's a load of loathing for their former class, delivered on a plate of platitudes."


Timothy Egan in The New York Times criticizes the "Horatio Algerians for the new Gilded Age."

"The Republicans Are Making It Easy for Him"

"In his speech in Cleveland, Obama made fun of this, too. He recalled how one Republican had told him that 'she couldn't agree with me more that we need to be helping working moms and dads more. Another wrote a policy memo saying that Republicans must define themselves as the party of the American worker, the party of higher wages.' The problem the Republicans have, the President went on, is that 'the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. The walk doesn't sync up with the talk. And all you have to do is look at the budget that House Republicans put forward just yesterday,' which 'doubles-down on trickle down.'"


John Cassidy in The New Yorker discusses President Obama's economic record.

"The Necessity of Making Distinctions Between the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

"Sometimes it feels as if the world is divided into two classes: one very large class spurns difficulty, while the other very much smaller delights in it. There are readers who, when encountering an unfamiliar word, instead of reaching for a dictionary, choose to regard it as a sign of the author's contempt or pretension, a deliberate refusal to speak in a language ordinary people can understand. Others, encountering the same word, happily seize on it as a chance to learn something new, to broaden their horizons. They eagerly seek a literature that upends assumptions, challenges prejudices, turns them inside out and forces them to see the world through new eyes.
"The second group is an endangered species."


Steve Wasserman in The American Conservative asks, "[w]hen did difficulty' become suspect in American culture, widely derided as anti-democratic and contemptuously dismissed as evidence of so-called elitism?"

"The Sociology Debate That Never Ends"

"Instead of pining for the past, we could be doing far, far more as a country to reduce material need for low-income families. Rather than try in vain to revive the idea of early marriage, we could also do more to educate working-class women about how to safely and effectively use contraception to avoid accidental pregnancies and encourage them to put off children until a bit later in life (which, yes, to some degree would just mean preaching what college-educated families already practice)."


Jordan Weissmann in Slate tries to settle the "values-versus-economics" argument regarding the rise of single-parent families.


Paul Krugman at The New York Times joins in.

"This Lame Duck Stuff Is Fun"

"Despite a great performance tonight, Scott has had a few recent stumbles.  The other week he said he didn’t know whether or not I was a Christian.  And I was taken aback, but fortunately my faith teaches us forgiveness.  So, Governor Walker, as-salamu alaykum."


The Washington Post publishes President Obama's speech at the Gridiron Club Dinner.

Whatever Happened to the Frat Pack?

"And this, perhaps, is why the last gasp of the Pack–Zoolander 2, which Stiller and Wilson teased this week on the Valentino catwalk–may just be a stroke of genius. Derek and Hansel were aware they were ageing models ripe for the recycling bin in the first film. Fifteen years on, their plight mirrors that of the actors playing them. Maybe there’s pathos in going out of fashion."


Benjamin Lee in The Guardian looks at the titans of 2000s' comedy.

"Wall Street Firm Develops New High-Speed Algorithm Capable Of Performing Over 10,000 Ethical Violations Per Second"

"'In the past, if one of our brokers wanted to exploit a questionably legal regulatory loophole or breach the covenant of good faith with an investment client, that would require hours of manually contravening the basic principles of professional integrity. But this innovative system will allow millions of such transgressions to go through every single day. Going forward, I expect this revolutionary program to be the cornerstone of our business.'"


From The Onion.

"We Certainly Have a Lot More in Common With Mississippi Than We Do With California, Alright?”

"'When modern Texans in cities such as Houston put on their boots and Stetsons and head for the rodeo or hearken back to the days of movie westerns that portrayed their state as cowboys, rustlers, and gunfighters, they are drawing on a collective memory that, although it has a basis in fact, is not the essence of Texas,' writes historian Randolph B. Campbell."


John Nova Lomax in Texas Monthly writes about how a southern state presented itself as western.

"Don Draper Lived on Hard Drives for Half a Decade Before Anybody Paid Him Any Notice"

Lacey Rose and Michael O'Connell in The Hollywood Reporter present an oral history of Mad Men.

"The Biggest Scam Bankrupting Business and the Middle Class"

"So what’s changed? Stock buybacks were once considered a form of illegal stock manipulation, until 1982, when President Ronald Reagan's Securities and Exchange Commission chair John Shad (a former Wall Street CEO) loosened the rules. It was this rule change that made possible the shift toward stock-based compensation that has driven the dramatic rise in the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay, from 20-to-one in 1965 to about 300-to-one today. Before 1982, such massive stock grants would have diluted the number of shares outstanding, causing both EPS and share prices to tumble. But armed with the SEC's seal of approval, CEOs can now prop up EPS by diverting profits into stock buybacks, making their own previously unimaginable compensation packages possible.
"The result has essentially been the creation of a gigantic game of financial 'keep away,' with CEOs and shareholders tossing a $700-billion ball back and forth over the heads of American workers, whose wages as a share of GDP have fallen in almost exact proportion to profit’s rise."


Nick Hanauer at the PBS Newshour argues that "stock buybacks are hurting the U.S. economy."

"Report: Whites More Likely To Be Named CEOs Than Equally Sociopathic Black Candidates"

"'My race shouldn't be a factor when I've proven that I'm a borderline psychopath who will step over anybody in my way to sate my fanatical lust for power,” he continued. 'When it comes to succeeding in the business world, that's all that should matter.'"


From The Onion.

None Dare Call It Treason

"But as has happened so many times before, Republicans seem to have concluded that there is one set of rules and norms that apply in ordinary times, and an entirely different set that applies when Barack Obama is the president. You no longer need to show the president even a modicum of respect. You can tell states to ignore the law. You can sabotage delicate negotiations with a hostile foreign power by communicating directly with that power.
"I wonder what they'd say if you asked them whether it would be acceptable for Democrats to treat the next Republican president that way."


Paul Waldman in The Washington Post reacts to the letter to Iran sent by Republican senators.

"Desegregating the American Tradition of Paranoia"

"The most relevant comparison for Carson isn't to Cain but to Michele Bachmann, the last Presidential aspirant who, despite membership in a group with a history as targets of discrimination, came to represent the twitchy ideals of American panic. Carson has written of his youth, 'Many of the whites in those days found ways to rationalize their unjust treatment of fellow human beings, arguing that they were not racists but rather protectors of traditional values.' Carson’s presence as a potential Presidential candidate represents a triumph, albeit a cynical one, over those rationalizations. He's moved the country one step closer to that moment when we will be measured not by the color of our skin but by the content of our conspiracy theories."


Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker looks at Ben Carson.

"Music Has Become Increasingly Dominated by Those Free from the Pressure of Having to Work for a Living"

"Bryant's point was not that he wants to take anything away from the wealthy. Instead, he wants to open up more opportunities for the rest, ensuring that pop music retains a wealth of voices, accents and reference points for years to come. That may sound like a cultural revolution too far for Blunt, but for the many musicians who are struggling to make their voices heard, it is one that is very much needed."


Matthew Whitehouse in i-D asks, "is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?"

"When Activists and Scholars Find Themselves in Conflict Over Critical Matters of Human Identity"

"That would be a shame, because in addition to being highly readable, 'Galileo's Middle Finger' has an important and seldom-voiced message. 'Science and social justice require each other to be healthy,' Dreger writes, 'and both are critically important to human freedom.' Yet, too often, from Dreger's perspective, ideological or politically strategic needs take priority over the evidence. People, while trying to do good, find themselves deliberately ignoring or obscuring the truth."


In Salon, Laura Miller reviews Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists and the Search for Justice in Science.


Tom Bartlett at The Chronicle of Higher Education talks with Dreger.

"Their Advantages Are Large and Growing"

"Education is supposed to help level the playing field. Horace Mann called it the 'great equalizer.' Now it's closer to the great fortifier—compounding the advantages of class, since the affluent come better prepared and more able to pay. A few decades ago, the gap between rich and poor kids in finishing college was 39 percentage points. It's now 51 percentage points. Even poor kids with high test scores are slightly less likely to get degrees than rich kids with low scores. Putnam rightly calls this 'shocking.'"


Jason DeParle in The New York Times reviews Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.

"A Rude Awakening for the Entire United States"

"For the first generation after World War II, American life was defined by one word: 'more.' Not just bigger cars and bigger houses, but two cars and two houses. The nation’s standard of living increased dramatically—on a pace to double every 33 years—with much of it generated by the auto industry. In 1949, America’s automobile fleet stood at 45 million. By 1972, it was 116 million—more cars than we could fill up from our own wells. The alpine graph of American prosperity had reached a plateau, and cutting off our supply of foreign oil was all it took to push it downhill."


In Salon, Edward McClelland argues that October 1973 "was a watershed month for the American middle class."

"They Held No Elected Office. But They Led a Nation"

"The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic effort. President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. One hundred Members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right it protects. If we want to honor this day, let these hundred go back to Washington, and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore the law this year."


Time provides a transcript of President Obama's speech in Selma, Alabama, marking fifty years since "Bloody Sunday."


James Fallows and Matt Ford at The Atlantic react to the speech.


As does Jonathan Chait at New York, and Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast.

"An Ice-Cold Political, Economic Calculation and It Worked Out for Them"

"These product lines have helped bring in new customers, many of whom are oblivious to the brand’s political overtones. One Czech anti-fascist activist, who, like many of his peers, asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, says 'the biggest share of the customers' in the Czech Republic is now older people and sporty types who wear it as a 'cool, macho brand.' In Slovakia, he says, the brand has become popular among metal and hip-hop fans. This spring, the owner of the company's first U.K. store, located in the largely Jewish North Finchley neighborhood in London, told The Independent that Thor Steinar wasn't a Nazi brand, but merely one that is popular in Eastern Europe. The company has also registered its trademark in the United States, and, according to Schmidt, is 'open' to the idea of expanding there."


Thomas Rogers in The New Republic discusses a European clothing company popular with neo-Nazis.

"Man Anxiously Scanning Bar's Reaction To Jukebox Selection"

"At press time, Chambers' confidence in his song was suddenly destroyed after seeing another patron briskly get up and begin quickly flipping through the jukebox song catalogue."


From The Onion.

"A Missed Opportunity to Crack Open a Hothouse Milieu"

"Mr. Christgau was born in 1942; his father was a New York City fireman. Reading 'Peter Pan' was an early influence, he says, because it 'synced up perfectly with everything I knew: the proposition that being a kid for life was a worthy ambition.' As a teenager he listened to the disc jockey Alan Freed on WINS and soon became obsessed with the Top 40. About the rock 'n' roll of that era, Mr. Freed's show taught him something essential: that 'cover artists were white and the originals were by Negroes.' He began to go into the city, as this book's title has it, to buy records."


In The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Robert Christgau's Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man.


In Salon, Scott Timberg interviews Christgau.