Journalism

Q.  How did you feel when you first heard the news that the Supreme Court had overruled DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act that had defined marriage as limited to two people of the opposite sex?
Dan Savage: I’m morbid, so my first thought was ‘I can die now.’
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

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The larger meaning of the Bradley Manning trial: former State Department whistleblower PETER Van BUREN, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, considers how America’s distant wars have come home — and how, under that pressure, this country is morphing into something unrecognizable. Peter writes for TomDispatch, HERE.  Alexa O’Brien trial coverage HERE.
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ALSO: HAROLD MEYERSON says L.A. has lessons for the American Left — about how to win: example, LAANE.  Harold’s report appears in The American Prospect, where he’s editor-at-large; he also write a column for the Washington Post op-ed page.

Plus: UCLA historian BRENDA STEVENSON remembers Latasha Harlins, the 15-year-old African American girl who was shot and killed in 1991 trying to pay $2 for a bottle of orange juice — and the killer got probation. That was shortly after the Rodney King beating and one year before the Rodney King Riots.  The terrible story of that killing is told in Brenda’s new book, The Contested Life of Latasha Harlins.

I got an e-mail from Edward Snowden yesterday. He says he’s got money in banks in Hong Kong and needs my help in getting it out. There are two surprises here: first, that he picked me; second, that his English is pretty bad. I’m excited that he picked me, but frankly I’m concerned about his writing. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

Gore Vidal died a year ago on Wednesday — his FBI file begins not with his political activism, or his homosexuality, but with a report that he made disparaging remarks about J. Edgar Hoover.
“The Gore Vidal FBI File” at TheNation.com: HERE

Reza Aslan: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved exclusively for the crime of sedition, for crimes against the state. If you know nothing else about Jesus except that his life ended on the cross at Golgotha, you know enough to understand who he was and what kind of threat he posed to Rome.
continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

Now that Janet Napolitano has been confirmed and will take over as UC president in September, we need her to acknowledge explicitly that secrecy and deportation are not what the University of California needs right now.
… continued at L.A. Times Letters page: http://lat.ms/1bQJubu

Fifty years ago — on June 25, 1963 — Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 had its US premiere in New York City. It’s a transparently autobiographical film about a world famous director unable to finish his next film, beset by doubts, anxieties, and nightmares. As the film opens, our hero Guido, Fellini’s alter ego, played by Marcello Mastroianni, faces a dilemma that may be familiar to many: What if your deadline arrived, but you had written nothing? What if people came to hear you, but you had nothing to say? What would happen if you ran out of ideas?
. . . continued at LA Review of Books HERE

“When it comes to selecting a commencement speaker, the nation’s top 100 universities lean decidedly left,” Fox News argues.
My response: so what?
At TheNation.com, HERE

Flying into Venice for a long-awaited vacation, the biggest thing we could see from the air was not the Piazza San Marco, or the Doge’s Palace, or the Basilica—the biggest thing in Venice was a cruise ship docked in the passenger port.
In town an hour later, we saw the posters, which said (in Italian, of course), “Defend the City—Take Back the Lagoon—Days of International Struggle Against the Big Ships—June 7-8-9.” We had arrived just in time. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com: HERE.

In the New York Times Book Review, there was “a mediocrity, and a lack of passion, character and eccentricity, a lack of literary tone itself.”
50 years of the New York Review of Books: my Q&A with Robert Silvers at the LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/50-years-of-nyrb-an-interview-with-robert-silvers