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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Why I Threw My Shoes At Bush?, Can Condoms Save Us From Climate Change? Time Magazine's Dishonest and Incompetent Profile on Glenn Beck, Dalrymple

Can Condoms Save Us From Climate Change? By Tara Lohan - The greenest technology available to us may not be solar panels, but instead contraception, according to a new report.

Why I Threw My Shoes At Bush By Mutadhar al-Zaidi - The Iraqi who went to jail for shoe-tossing at Bush has been released from prison and speaks out. "Here I am, free. But my country is still a prisoner of war."

Time Magazine's Dishonest and Incompetent Profile on Glenn Beck Enables His Sick Lies By Jamison Foser - The profile whitewashes the shock jock's dishonesty and recycles his false claims. No wonder nobody trusts mainsteam media.

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings - Ian Sansom asks if a notorious life must always take eventual precedence over the writer's work. In the hands of a great biographer, a writer's life, rather than their work, becomes their chef d'oeuvre. Everything they have sought to escape and to overcome, to translate, suddenly redounds upon them. Wonderful fictional character X turns out to be pathetic real-life character Y; incredible plot twist turns out to be personal tragedy. Reverse alchemy. Which is why writers are wary of biographers. When Somerset Maugham remarked, "A life of myself is bound to be dull", he wasn't being modest. He was trying to hide. In The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings pulls back the curtains and turns on all the taps: the book is a torrent of sex, money, fame, misery and betrayal.

Racism in America Doesn't Stop with Glenn Beck and His Fans -- It's in Our Health Care Debate Too By Allison Kilkenny -As much as white Americans hate to admit it, race issues are always in play, whether we're talking about unequal health care access or Limbaugh's latest rant.

Media Shut Out of O'Reilly Speech to Values Voter Summit; Blogger Mike Stark Forcibly Removed By Array -What did Bill O'Reilly have to say to the religious right that he didn't want the rest of us to hear?

8 Years of War: Speak Out Against the Occupation of Afghanistan By Array -It will take constant pressure on Congress and the White House to get them to pull back from the fog of war.

My Paper Chase by Harold Evans By Ian Jack - Ian Jack is reminded of a golden age of journalism by Harold Evans's rags-to riches autobiography. Harold Evans edited the Sunday Times between 1967 and 1981, when it was advertised as "one of the world's great newspapers" on the sides of the delivery vans that queued up every week outside its offices in Gray's Inn Road. I can't remember that any of us on the paper doubted this boast. The Sunday Times in those years set standards of liberal, humane and inquiring journalism that made the staff proud to work for it. In Lord Thomson (and, later, his son), the paper had a benevolent and non-interventionist proprietor; in Evans, one of the most creative editors in British newspaper history. Everybody knew him as "Harry" and, though he had some irritating, quicksilver qualities, none of his faults could dent our solid affection for him - or not, at least, for long.

Home truths on abroad By William Dalrymple -What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller? Who are the successors to Chatwin, Lewis and Thesiger? William Dalrymple names a new generation of stars and sees a sparkling future for the genre - one less to do with posturing and heroic adventures than an intimate knowledge of people and places
Last year, on a visit to the Mani in the Peloponnese, I went to visit the headland where Bruce Chatwin had asked for his ashes to be scattered. The hillside chapel where Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth, brought his urn lies in rocky fields near the village of Exchori, high above the bay of Kardamyli. It has a domed, red-tiled roof and round arcaded windows built from stone the colour of haloumi cheese. Inside are faded and flaking Byzantine frescoes of mounted warrior saints, lances held aloft.

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