Tom Mueller talks to charismatic comedian Beppe Grillo about his serious goals for Italy: http://nyr.kr/XSBWOa

Photograph by Stefano De Luigi.

Virginia Cannon on Dorothy Day:

Dorothy Day, a heroine of the American left and perhaps the most famous radical in the history of the American Catholic Church, led one of those remarkable lives that encompassed all the major upheavals of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century, remarkably, finds her being touted for canonization, with a big push this week from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York. It’s a terrific idea: a home-town saint for the Occupy Wall Street era….

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/UfDyyx

(Source: newyorker.com)

This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done. 

It’s the wrong lesson… Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.

What Stonewall got right, and Occupy got wrong: http://nyr.kr/L8gITl

An Occupy Wall St. cartoon from Mick Stevens. The Occupy May Day protests are on the move. Revisit our piece about the origins of the movement

A one per cent cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/v57amg

(Source: newyorker.com)

iPhones vs. the Police

But things are different nowadays. Smart phones have cameras, and almost everyone has a smart phone. A court is therefore less likely to be ignorant of what actually occurred between the policeman and me. The policeman and I may have videotaped it. Bystanders might have, too. I am reminded of the utopia dreamed of by the eighteenth-century anarchist William Godwin, who hoped that someday everyone in the world would become so sincere and so expressive that all sides of every story would be fully narrated, and there would no longer be any need to deceive. Everyone would be his own narrator, and in the world that this sincerity revealed, perfect knowledge would include perfect forgiveness.

The Politics of Dissolution

You can’t get much further apart on the socio-economic ladder than Peter Thiel and Ray Kachel. The former is a Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge-fund manager, with sharply conservative-libertarian views; the latter is, currently, a homeless man in New York City, with left-wing politics and about two dollars to his name. It was coincidence, not the urge to make an obvious point about inequality in America, that landed my Profiles of Thiel and Kachel in successive issues of the magazine. Yet these men have something to do with each other, something beyond the fact that both made a living, in very different capacities, in Web technology.

- In today’s Daily Comment, George Packer looks at two of his recent interviewees—Peter Thiel and Ray Kachel—and explains how both “embody what could be called the politics of dissolution” http://nyr.kr/u3RcLn

wearethe99percent:

I am 42 years old, with a graduate degree. I am one of the lucky ones. I work three jobs. I am a teacher, an interpretr, and a braille processor. I work as much as I can because I am the sole support of my household, and I am the only one with health insurance. We live paycheck to paycheck. I am lucky, but I too am part of the 99%

OCCUPYWALLST.ORG

George Packer: ““We are the ninety-nine per cent” has become a clarifying slogan for the public’s inchoate discontent. A Tumblr blog that takes the phrase as its name has assembled a gallery of hundreds of anonymous people holding up personal statements written on pieces of paper…When dozens of these compressed life stories are read in a row, they amass the moral force of a Steinbeck novel.”

- In this week’s issue, George Packer spends time with Ray Kachel and other Occupy Wall Street protestors: http://nyr.kr/t0rnBx

In this week’s issue, George Packer tells the stories of some of the Occupy protesters; Adam Gopnik explores “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and young-adult fantasy books; James Surowiecki on Europe’s catastrophic stubbornness; Paul Slansky administers a debates quiz in Shouts & Murmurs; Lauren Collins on wireless network names [subscription required]; and more.

Q: What strikes you as especially interesting about the origins of the movement?

Mattathias Schwartz:  This whole “ego-less” thing is very interesting to me — I tried to focus on it as much as I could in the story. The OWS movement has a real taboo on individuals accumulating power or authority over others. This isn’t unprecedented — some of it is reminiscent of Ella Baker and SNCC and lots of other historical precursors — but to me it was very interesting. You would think that *someone* would want to step out in front of this and claim to be in charge of it, but that’s not happened as of yet.

- This week in the magazine, Mattathias Schwartz writes about the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street. On Tuesday, Schwartz answered readers’ questions in a live chat. Click through to read a transcript of the discussion: http://nyr.kr/rUP28I