walmart and kikuo rose rice

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You probably almost never notice the “spots,” tiny drawings that appear throughout the magazine to help even out the columns and break up large chunks of text. This week’s, by R. Kikuo Johnson, all depict people in hoodies. Way to go, New Yorker.

joins the chorus of pundits shaming the Supreme Court for straying into politics.

A bunch of stories I skipped: Steve Coll on ExxonMobil, Rivka Galchen on the German public’s fixation on American Indians, Ben McGrath on the Miami Marlins. I did, however, devour Evan Osnos’s about the gambling industry in Macau, which takes in five times as much dough per year as Las Vegas does. That story introduces a man who has become mythical in China as “the God of Gamblers,” just as the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s short story identifies himself as a “Conceptual Lesbian.”

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I also read with interest Xan Rice’s story, about Kenyan runners in general and Olympic champion Samuel Wanjiru in particular.

Otherwise, not a lot of essential reading. on the Citizens United court case — the one that has unleashed a bottomless flood of unaccountable corporate donations to this year’s elections — reveals the couple of small errors on the part of the Solicitor General’s office that allowed this egregious legislation to get by the Supreme Court. But Toobin basically establishes that the Supreme Court has a very, very long history of being very conservative in the direction of considering corporations to be “people” whose First Amendment right to self-expression is sacrosanct. Which is of course of a lot of horseshit that denies what should be perfectly obvious to any impartial law court, which is that the money corporations have to sling around allows them to drown out the voices of actual people.

Aside from the cover by Bob Staake and about Obama’s endorsing gay marriage, the most remarkable thing about this issue for me is the indication that Robert Falls has upped the profile of Chicago’s Goodman Theater so much now that many of its productions command coverage by New York critics. s Falls’ production of The Iceman Cometh, starring Nathan Lane but featuring a couple of young actors who Hilton thinks are stars of tomorrow (Patrick Andrews and Kate Arrington). And the always plugged-in culture reporter Alec Wilkinson’s follows the acclaimed black Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson to clown school. I have yet to see Thompson onstage but I plan to repair that lacuna the next chance I get.

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Last week’s issue, by the way, had a terrific , about his life under the fatwa that made him a target for assassination by Muslim fanatics, and a good and the evolution of Einstein on the Beach.

I did also love this amazing photo by Martin Roemers that accompanied Mohsin Hamid’s short story “The Third-Born”:

Key quote from William Gavin, an advisor to Richard Nixon who wrote in a memo: "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we're talking about…Reason requires a higher degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand. . . . When we argue with him we demand that he make the effort of replying. We seek to engage his intellect, and for most people this is the most difficult work of all. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable."

The best thing about this issue is Jill Lepore’s American Chronicles piece about the two individuals who created the whole industry of political lobbying . Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, a couple of right-wing conservative,  created Campaigns Inc. in 1933. They started out in newspapers and then figured out how to run political campaigns in favor of businesses by smudging the line between advertising, advocacy, and journalism. They were the ones who first undertook to persuade the American public that universal health care was “socialized medicine” and therefore unspeakably evil. It’s a fascinating and disheartening chapter of American political history.

A weird thing about the New Yorker’s annual Cartoon Issue is that it pretty much always creates high expectations and doesn’t live up to them. This week, as in the past, the cartoons don’t seem as good as many regular issues, even though there are twice as many.

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cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey

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