I’ll grant you that Fourth Of July weekend isn’t typically spent sitting around reading, but if your holiday weekend gets rained out or you’ve eaten your entire body weight in hot dogs and pie and need to sit quietly for a while, maybe you might like something to look at.
Published in 1947, “Goodnight Moon” took hold as an omnipresent part of American culture as the Cult of Overindulged Childhood arrived in the 1980s and today is something of an institution in and of itself. The author of the book, Margaret Wise Brown, was a prolific writer of children’s books at a time when they were not nearly as big a deal as they are now, but she willed the royalties from several of her books to the three children of close family friends just shortly before her own sudden death in 1952. As the reputation and sales of “Goodnight Moon” grew over the years, the royalties turned into a small fortune for the beneficiary of that title, a fellow named Albert Clarke. This 2000 Wall Street Journal profile of Clarke by journalist Joshua Prager is not the story you’d like it to be, given the setup, but is fascinating nonetheless. (via longform.org)
Speaking of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, this Splitsider post about Calvin & Hobbes by AJ Aronstein is a nice consideration of the problem with nostalgia, seen through the lens of a 20-something who is becoming aware of his own past and sees the overindulgence in nostalgia via the Internet as troubling. Personally, I am very glad that my own decade of childhood nostalgia happened before the Internet came along, because it helped preserve some of the “lostness”; now, of course, every decade of pop culture is so oversaturated online that it’s trivial to reclaim it, but without the sentimentality that comes with that reconnection that happens to people in their 20s.
This isn’t a terribly long piece, but bears reading: AdBusters.org recently ran this harrowing excerpt of a first-hand account of torture in an Egyptian jail from an Australian Muslim who was arrested in Pakistan after 9/11 and turned over to the CIA as a terrorist. The U.S. handed him over to Egypt, which was obligingly handling “coercive interrogation” for us in the years before we became torturers ourselves. He was tortured for five months before being sent to Guantanamo for three years. His torturer was the man who is now the U.S.-approved ruler who replaced Hosni Mubarak after the “Arab Spring” revolution. Keep that in mind when you tell yourself about how wonderful the “democratic revolution” in Egypt was.
From the “Be Careful What You Wish For” Department comes this Salon article by author Tim Johnston, who found himself the subject of some public praise by David Sedaris, which turned his novel into the Book Tour From Hell.
This Dangerous Minds post about the Greek financial crisis is a good backgrounder if you hadn’t followed much of the story prior to the onset of rioting and the austerity measures imposed by the parliament this week. By contrast, it’s worth reading this much-longer piece from the March issue of Vanity Fair which explores the Irish financial crisis, which somehow did NOT turn into riots and mayhem.
This article from the British conservative magazine Prospect is a short look at how the central government in China is cleverly managing a resurgence in a Mao personality cult among younger people who did not live through the uphevals of Mao’s rule in order to generate domestic support for the party and international interest in “red tourism” just in time for the Chinese Communist Party’s 90th anniversary.
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