If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics
are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these scenic
treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.

If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent estate art I would comb these galleries as an alternative to the pricier Hamptons and Manhattan galleries where prices are driven up by overhead, including the high cost of taste-making.

Traditionally buyers look to the Hamptons and Manhattan to enhance their city homes or their investments. They tend to beautify their second homes with Hudsoniana or art relevant to the locale of the homes. This categorical mindset doesn’t well serve the buyer or the country galleries. (more…)

We live in a society that has reached an incredible consensus, in spite of all the red state-blue state talk: we agree that it’s something akin to a terror alert to talk straight. (more…)

Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it is about bad behavior, disaster, crime, nasty mouths, lies, spin, malfeasance—and a little upbeat story here and there as condiment. (more…)

The glory of Christianity is its gospel of love, charity and compassion, so why do condemnatory histrionics from the pulpit about family values, abortion and homosexuality dominate news of Christendom while the pulpit’s deafening silence about a church-going society that allows insurance adjusters to make a mockery of its dearest tenets is met with complimentary silence in the media? (more…)

Greg Palast, the outré investigative reporter, claims the Iraq war and the subsequent surge are a global swindle— read about it here— a conspiracy of government and industry to pick our pockets and to hell with the future.

How much truth there is in this, if any, remains to be seen. But considering the sheer amount of inconsequential BS fed to us by the media—Barack Obama’s elitism, Hillary Clinton’s abrasiveness, etc—isn’t it a wee bit strange that nobody in the mainstream media even pretends to examine Palast’s contention? Reminds you of how they sat on their hands while the White House lied us into a catastrophic war, doesn’t it?

After all, media gasbags are perfectly willing to waste their time and ours entertaining stupid notions like the McCain-Clinton gas tax holiday or some ditzy celeb’s boringly bad behavior, so what’s their problem giving Palast’s theory a toss? Oh, that would be irresponsible journalism, right? Like yakking about John Edwards’ hair?

And why hasn’t Congress asked him to testify. After all, he was once a congressional investigator.

I don’t always know what to make of Palast. His hopped-up language worries his most serious reports. But we know Enron manipulated California’s power supply, so why is Palast’s notion so unworthy of inquiry? Is it unimaginable that Big Oil would con us? Or is it because the Big Media yakkers, while telling us what a great job they are doing, are doing a job on us? —DM

Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us
that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children.

Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving strange animals decent burials? Have you noticed how much they see that adults don’t even think worthy of seeing, just as adults haven’t seen the rape of the planet worthy of their hifalutin attention? (more…)

If you’d like to look at the changing face of news, consider your own Google home page. Savor its interactivity. You can organize your news, weather maps, solar systems, art exegesis, you name it, and the list of “gadgets” grows almost daily. You can design your own newspaper.

But it’s no longer a paper, it’s news from the ether, and it’s being updated and reedited around the clock. More than all the words about the demise of the newspaper, your home page can tell the story. You can do with your cursor what it costs a paper-and-ink newsroom big bucks to do. (more…)

(This is the latest transcript of Hot Copy my regular podcast for The Student Operated Press)

One of the reasons I cherish The New York Times is its institutional eye for the easy-to-overlook and profound. The March 27th front page features a story by Brian Stelter called Finding Political News Online, Young Viewers Pass It Along. It may prove to be the most significant story of the first fifty years of the century, and to its credit The Times put it on the front page.

The story is about the socialization of news and imagery, not in the political sense, but in the sense that sharing news and imagery has become part of the way we socialize with each other. We like a blog post, a news story, an essay, an image, a poem, a quotation, and next thing you know it’s whizzing around the world to friends and family. What we’re accustomed to calling news is becoming as personal and intimate as a jewel box or a pack of baseball cards. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)