Man, lately you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an article by Johann Hari somewhere. If, by some chance, you have been swinging your dead cat and missing, Hari is a young British journalist, who rose to fame while at Cambridge about 10 years ago, and, like a lot of contemporary journos, is known for his political activism and advocacy as well as his writing. He’s won a bunch of awards including the 2008 George Orwell Prize for political writing and the 2010 Martha Gelhorn Prize for war reporting.
Personally, I rather like his writing. He’s a lot more versatile than some older and well-established political journalists, but a lot less “watch me, I’m amazing” than people like Malcolm Gladwell. Here are thee recent articles in three different publications which give you a sense of his versatility:
This review in the New York Times of a new biography of Winston Churchill looks at the fundamental contradiction of Churchill’s own Victorian/Edwardian worldview versus the repudiation of the very same ideals as re-interpreted by Nazism decades later and Churchill’s seeming embrace of democratic ideals in response.
At his regular gig as a commentator for the British newspaper The Independent, Hari looks back at the Good Old Days of the 1990s and 2000s and the way management consultancy firms basically bullshitted their way to extreme profitability and helped to created the failed corporations that litter the landscape today.
And at The Huffington Post, he has this depressing piece that sort of restates an obvious situation: global warming is getting worse, but nobody is really willing to do a damn thing about it, even if they aren’t busy denying its very existence.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
