Gleanings: November 11, 2012
Migrations : The Last Word On Nothing
How fragile they are. How amazing that they know the way home, that some of them make it, and that then they do it all over again.
For Pieter ten Hoopen, Following Footsteps Into Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’ – NYTimes.com
Pieter ten Hoopen grabbed onto a rope and made his way down an incline with a sense of foreboding. He was uncertain what he would find at the end of the 300-meter blue rope. He knew there might be clothing, empty pill containers and a diary, a scene suggesting that a suicide had taken place. Reaching the end of the rope, he was relieved there wasn’t a body or human remains.
Eleanor Arnason’s Web Log: Genre Fiction
What he describes as “literary” sounds like the classic bourgeois novel of character and psychology. These can certainly be good. But they have were done in the 19th century and early 20th century, and I see no reason to do them again. If I want to read one, I will get out James or Proust.
Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
While anthems have been written to jet travel, locomotives, and the lure of the open road, the poetry of vertical transportation is scant. What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down?
twin city sidewalks: Nine Ways the US Democratic System Screws its Cities
he game is rigged against urban life, against the very places where the most people live. Jeffersonian agoraphobia lies at the very heart of our constitutions and procedures.
Dear Young Conservative – DC Pierson
The war in which they’ve enlisted you is one in which, if your side triumphs, you will need to hold two low-paying full-time jobs just to make ends meet, and neither job gives you health benefits because it’s hard for either company’s CEO to give you those benefits and also be as ultra-rich as they’d like to be, and if you get hurt or sick, nothing and no one will be there to help you, your only solution will be to work harder and harder for less and less until you die
The American Scholar: Master of the Examined Life – Paula Marantz Cohen
Why not call this program the MEL: the Master of the Examined Life. The degree would not require writing, though it would encourage it. It would involve reading about deep, far-reaching subjects, and discussing them.
Robert Ben Rhoades: The Truck Stop Killer by Vanessa Veselka
It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims.
Jonah Lehrer, Scientists, and the Nature of Truth – Virginia Hughes
Here is Lehrer, one of the best science writers I ever read, publishing in the most elite magazine with the help of the smartest editors and most rigorous fact-checkers. And still, still, the story isn’t true.
‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ Uncovered – NYTimes.com
The popularity of the picture, which has been colorized, satirized, burlesqued with the Muppets and turned into a life-size sculpture by Sergio Furnari, is partly about the casual recklessness of its subjects: The beam on which they sit seems suspended over an urban abyss, with the vastness of Central Park spread out behind them and nothing, seemingly below.
Fantasyland – Frank Rich
At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that rejects Keynesian economics, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Laden’s death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense. It’s the GOP that demands the rewriting of history (and history textbooks), still denying that Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” transformed the party of Lincoln into a haven for racists.
The NYT Lens blog has a fascinating 
There’s a danger of nostalgia when looking at these seventy haunting pictures, but we should, as the artist did, beware of falling into it. These are not pictures of the good old days or of some lost Shangri-la of refined taste and quality buildings. These are the practical everyday places, used places, streets where ordinary people lived and grain elevators, railroad yards, and factories where they carried their lunch buckets to work. What these photographs give us is insight into the pulsing real life of cities where we had not previously thought to look for beauty.
by Mike Melman
. Holm, Minnesota’s poet of failure, quiet, and solitude, understands what Melman is doing with these photographs.