Lawrence of ArabiaNick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
I'm reading this book right now. Apparently it will soon be a movie starring someone in 2006. I checked out from the library (it's about a month overdue) and I had to repeat the title to the librarian about six times until we were both thoroughly embarassed since I don't think he quite believed me the first five times. Memoirs are something of a fad now, but this book is arguably the best one out there.
Jeffrey Herbst: States and Power in Africa
I first realized I wanted to be a political scientist while reading this book for the second time. Stresses imposed borders, population density and distribution, and the problem of "broadcasting" authority across vast tracts of sparsely populated lands as key challenges of African political development.
Jeanette Winterson: The Passion
The Passion, a story of a French peasant boy who cooks chickens in Napolean's army and the cross-dressing, web-footed Venetian daughter of a boatman he falls in love with, I fell in love with for its language. I haven't read a book this beautiful The Great Gatsby.
Incidentally, I saw Jeanette Winterson at PEN World Voices 2006. She was humble and frank and really next to Chinua Achebe the most impressive person there.
My "Africans to Bono" piece, translated into Chinese by a friend of mine. My inbox is already starting to curse me for writing it. 我想知道中国人对这个话题的看法。请你请你说一下你的意见。
作者：Jennifer Brea 写于2007年7月3日，星期二
是让非洲想象它自己未来的时候了。
坦桑尼亚阿鲁沙——非洲是一个让人绝望的洲。在这里
这就是非洲，它迫切地需要我们的帮助。幸运的是，已经有一些来自美
奇怪的是，并不是所有的本地人都对此心存感激。
Me, once again, on my soapbox..
"We have the strongest economy of any major industrialized country in the world."
So said Karl Rove at a recent Republican fundraiser. Apparently America's booming economy is going to be the cornerstone of this fall's midterm elections.
This may be true, but whenever I see someone laud our GDP growth as proof of our superiority (if not well-being), I feel compelled to recite the following litany of facts most Americans are not aware of:
Today, I was in Princeton at a health food store minding my own business when I was accosted by a kindly old woman who asked me if I went to Harvard. "No," I said, forgetting I was wearing the Harvard shirt my boyfriend accuses me of buying to show off. "I went to Princeton."
We exchanged some of the usual pleasantries and the woman seemed nice enough until she narrowed her eyes and asked me almost accusingly: "Are you Left or are you Right?"
"Pardon me?" I asked.
"Did the school turn you Left or are you Right?" she asked.
"Well I guess I'm pretty liberal," I said meekly, "But it's not really that simple..."
This, of course, is what I think the old woman had really been hoping to hear, as it set her off on a tirade the likes of which I have not seen since Brother Stephen's holy roller days (fire and brimstone raining down mostly on jews, liberals and homosexuals) were brought to an end when he was convicted of trying to pay a teenage boy to give him a blow job.
Continue reading "A Proud Graduate of the University of Fox News" »
On an absolute whim I found myself skipping lunch, borrowing the office camera and ducking out of work at 4:30pm to go to yesterday's Union Square-to-Battery Park rally and protest march. The march was organized by a variety of community-based organizations and political groups and was part of a series of marches held around the country for "A Day Without Immigrants," a national strike meant to demonstrate the vital part immigrants - legal or not - play in the US economy.
Since my other posts have probably already given away my political leanings, it's no surprise that not only am I completely opposed to all of the more ridiculous Republican proposals (e.g., building a giant fence along a 2,000 mile border; denying healthcare, education, and legal counsel to immigrants and their children; expelling the 12 million laborers who help make our lives easier and cheaper), I have a hard time taking any of it seriously. Every immigrant group - the Germans, the Irish, the Polish, the Italian, the Chinese - was hated by those groups that had arrived earlier and already "assimilated." More established groups have always supported exclusion acts and intelligence testing and eugenics programs and...I'm sure you have heard more than your ear's full elsewhere. (If you haven't please visit the Eugenics Archive) This is in our history, in our blood, and no doubt these immigrants who now protest will, in two generations or so, be voting to exclude the next group of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses..
Continue reading ""A Day Without Immigrants" - New York City Protest March" »
I'm trying *not* to post a ton of About.com articles on my personal blog, but I absolutely have to post a newly retooled article on the student protests in France against the CPE. A really good friend of mine teaching in Paris emailed me to say that "most of the opinions [presented] don't really even try to
understand the french mentality" and the article was "polemically NOT
comprehensive." I realize I made a sort of rookie journalism mistake of relying too heavily on English language media, mainstream media, and well, whatever Google was telling me, and in the process completely failed to give adequate time to legitimate arguments against the law.
Continue reading "French Student Protests Against the CPE" »
I am going to keep this post short so as to try and limit your dose of my own self-righteousness (I'll break that promise), but here it is. Thirty bodies were found yesterday just north of Baghdad, all of them decapitated. For me, it triggered a breakdown in my detached, world news, blogging mindset.
Decapitating humans is hard work. It takes force. It's extremely up close and personal. There must have been gallons of blood and spinal fluid pouring down the streets and splattered all over the executioners' hands and faces when they were done.
These weren't the first thirty bodies. Nor will they be the last. But it's what got to me and got me writing.
This AP article really gave me a glimmer of hope. There are bastions of liberalism in the heartland. Of course, that may change if David Horowitz has his way with higher education.
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution. A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies." Read the full article >>> "
News articles:
Tags:
University of Kansas, Kansas, Creationism, Intelligent Design, Education
My very first piece for Flak Magazine is going "live" on Tuesday. It has been hailed as "not as strong as it could be" but still "worthwhile." The first paragraph is reprinted below:
Conservative Is the New Progressive
by Jen Brea
America is at war. Defeat, though not yet inevitable, looms on the horizon. However, this time around, impending doom comes not in the form of North Korean missiles, Iranian nuclear reactors, Al Qaeda suicide bombers, or even Mexican immigrants. No, so some say, the handmaiden of the next apocalypse was grown right here in America. It is the loose women, the sodomites, the baby-killers, the career mothers and the liberal academics who have turned places like New York, San Francisco and New Orleans into a thousand Sodoms and Gomorrahs just waiting to be smote. But just when all hope seems lost, an army of the faithful grows in influence, wielding a weapon with the power to save us all from the hells of our own moral relativism: the Bible.
For the full text of this article, visit: http://www.flakmag.com/opinion/itsback.html
Tags:
religion, American politics, Bible, education, Christian right, apocalypse, Bible education
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