Fugitive Writings

2010-07-25

If you’re not watching Mad Men, we have nothing to discuss.

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So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.

— Peter Gibbons, Office Space, on IFC right now

2010-07-10

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

— Nikola Tesla, born this day in 1856

2010-07-08

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich expresses his opinion of the people of Illinois, from a government wiretap (PDF) on Election Day 2008. As you can imagine, it’s not safe for work.

The people of the state of Illinois twice elected this man governor. They got exactly what they deserved.

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The best sentence in today’s New York Times

“You’re among friends here, if your friends are the sort with significant disposable income, leisure time and a gift for quiet flamboyance.”

— describing the mood at Peter Elliot Men, from a Critical Shopper story by Jon Caramanica

In the days since Rolling Stone published an article that cost Gen. Stanley McChrystal his job, there’s been some discussion about whether a military beat reporter would have published as many damaging quotations as Michael Hastings did in his article. (See: Jack Shafer, Thomas Ricks, Andrew Sullivan, Jay Rosen.)

It seems apparent that most beat reporters have to trade some degree of self-censorship (say, not reporting a four-star general groaned when he got an e-mail from a high-ranking diplomat) for access to an official’s inner sanctum (say, a four-star general’s Situational Awareness Room).

That said, McChrystal should have known better. Hastings’ damn-the-torpedoes reporting has a clear precedent at Rolling Stone: Hunter S. Thompson. This is from the Author’s Note for Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72:

Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.” In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, an in order to protect them — and to keep them as sources of private information — you wind up knowing a lot of things you can’t print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.

This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the ’72 presidential campaign. As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as “off the record.” The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists — in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in … especially not for “minor infactions” of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is a panic on both ends. […]

When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap. Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me — because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill.

Michael Hastings’ ballsy reporting means that McChrystal and his staff — “a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs,” he wrote — will be flying cargo planes full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong. I’d wager he wasn’t interested in becoming a regular Pentagon correspondent.

2010-06-14

So this pretty much sums up my weekend.

2010-06-09

“I went to law school at a place called Pepperdine. Malibu, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A lot of surfing and movie stars and all of the rest. I barely knew where that law library was. So, if you’re asking me a constitutional law question: In fact, I got a ‘C’ in constitutional law and I was lucky to get that.” — Rod Blagojevich, June 2003

I like to imagine that, during his trial, former Gov. Blagojevich’s thoughts will occasionally drift to this statement.

2010-06-03

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.

— Alain de Botton on distraction