Lauren Berlant in The Nation, Against Sexual Scandal: “Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous [...]
Entries Tagged as 'usa'
‘Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex.’
March 13th, 2008
Tags: eliot spitzer · erotophobia · media · sex · sexuality · usa
This ain’t Aruba, bitch.
February 2nd, 2008
“This ain’t Aruba, bitch.” – Bunk (The Wire: Unconfirmed Reports.) Entertainment Weekly, ”The Wire”: Bright Lies, Big City: “Last night’s epigraph – ”This ain’t Aruba, bitch” – was delivered by a slurring Bunk at the bar. All those black bodies found in the rowhouses aren’t enough to warrant a continued investigation, and Bunk, McNulty, and [...]
Tags: aruba · crime · joran van der sloot · media · mwws · natalee holloway · nl · the wire · tv · usa
In Praise of Melancholy
January 21st, 2008
‘Shipwreck timber littering coast’ (BBC). Photo: pip aka flipflop :) (idem) Eric G. Wilson, In Praise of Melancholy. American culture’s overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life: “I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an [...]
Tags: fishing · health · melancholy · usa
The modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation
December 18th, 2007
‘A 19th-century image shows federal troops employing several forms of torture. One man stood on a barrel for several hours; another carried a large log, his leg weighted with a ball and chain; a third was bound to a tree with his arms raised above his head; a fourth sat on the ground, tied.’ Boston [...]
Rolling Stone: How America Lost the War on Drugs
December 4th, 2007
Ben Wallace-Wells, How America Lost the War on Drugs: “The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that [...]
Tags: colombia · crime · economics · latin america · mexico · usa · war on drugs