longreads:

Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next:

In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

“The Fourth State of Matter.” — Jo Ann Beard, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996

See also: “Chicago Christmas, 1984.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2003

Cartoon of the day. For more, visit: http://nyr.kr/z1KrDl

(Source: newyorker.com)

Can Rubio Control the Candidates?

A joint Univision, ABC News, and Latino Decisions survey released Wednesday drives home the point. Yes, the survey reports that jobs and the economy are the foremost concern for Hispanics. But electoral decisions are not made in laboratory settings where issues are dissected. Feelings enter the equation. When the survey probed beneath the surface, more than half of Hispanic voters said that they would be less likely to support a Republican candidate who pledged to veto the Dream Act, which would give college students who came to America illegally as children a path to citizenship. (And all of the remaining candidates have spoken against the Dream Act.) Only seventeen per cent of Hispanics said Republicans were doing a good job of reaching out to their community.

Every time Romney and Gingrich and Santorum and Paul thump on about “illegals” or about keeping them from invading America, many Hispanics don’t hear a law-and-order argument. They hear: You don’t like us. Senator Rubio, who says that his endorsement, which is highly coveted, will not be given before the Florida primary next Tuesday, knows this.

My Favorite Records: Alec Baldwin

Steely Dan: “A Decade of Steely Dan”

Becker and Fagen, like Paul Simon, are among the few rock artists who have joined poetic lyrics to great music with almost Sondheimesque skill. (Honorable mention: Talking Heads.)

 Stevie Wonder: “Songs in the Key of Life”

Stevie Wonder’s seminal two-record album, the culmination of his blend of funk, soul, and ballads, has some of the most romantic music of all time. (Honorable mention: any love song sung by Marvin Gaye.)

- Above, the first four entries on Alec Baldwin’s list of favorite records. Read the rest of the list, and listen to Baldwin’s Mix Tape on Spotify.

Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

Screen Shot; Lana Del Rey’s fixed image

In the fifteen songs on “Born to Die,” Del Rey is both theatrical and noncommittal. But the new album does not make “Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant” seem like an error that needed redacting. The earlier work had a variety of tempos, styles, and moods, which may be exactly why Del Rey ditched it; its song titles hinted at a notion of going retro (“Put Me in a Movie,” “Mermaid Motel”), but the ungainly album title revealed ambivalence about Grant’s identity. “Born to Die,” by contrast, is a model of consistent branding. The string section thrums in permanent lassitude, the number of beats per minute hovers in the eighties, and Del Rey’s pliable, smoky voice suggests that nothing is a problem, including the narrative contradictions that she plants throughout the album.

Several demos were leaked before the album’s release, and they played with faster tempos and guitars and more aggressive sounds. All of that is gone. The lack of active rhythms was a wise correction by somebody: Del Rey is often at a loss when mobile—she won’t be challenging Beyoncé to a dance-off anytime soon—but she’s fairly compelling when simply looking into a camera and declaiming. Anyone crouching on the Internet, ready to tag Del Rey’s mistakes, will be frustrated by “Born to Die,” which is too expert to register as a failure.

Cartoon of the day. On Tuesday, the cartoonist, Shannon Wheeler, chatted with fans about the above cartoon over on The New Yorker Cartoons Facebook page. He also shared some early drafts of the cartoon.

For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/xDomJR

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Joy of Silent Film

Clowning, it seems to me, is where silent film is at its most playful and its most poetic. Nowadays, we talk of “standup” comedy, a phrase that indicates by its very description how frozen the body has become; entertainers are now “talking heads.” Silent films celebrated the poetry of motion. Silent film elevated the kinetic to metaphor. “I was alien to the slick tempo,” Chaplin wrote of his first trip to America in 1910. “In New York even the owner of the smallest enterprise acts with alacrity…. The soda jerk, when serving an egg malted milk, performs like a hopped up juggler.” The silent clowning—Chaplin’s especially—turned the exhausting American momentum into fun.

Cartoon of the day. For more: http://nyr.kr/z9Tem7

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm

Photograph by Steve Liss.

The Quiet Admiral

McRaven didn’t actually kill bin Laden. The shot was fired by one of twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan on the night of May 1st, stormed bin Laden’s compound, and took his body away. Their identities remain secret. And McRaven might have preferred the same. His name, however, became part of the lore of the raid after Panetta, who was the director of the C.I.A., told PBS’s Jim Lehrer that McRaven was the “real commander” of the Abbottabad mission. McRaven had long been revered inside the special-operations community, but he was hardly known outside of military circles. In fact, immediately after finishing with Panetta, Lehrer felt obliged to inform viewers that McRaven was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC (McRaven has since received his fourth star and been promoted to commander of Special Operations Command, of which JSOC is one component.)

- Nicholas Schmidle on Admiral Bill McRaven. Last August, Schmidle wrote in detail about McRaven’s role overseeing the bin Laden mission.