Journalism

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

We win: Southern California Edison announced Friday it will shut down the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant south of Los Angeles.
Permanently.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174714/we-win-san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant-will-be-shut-down#ixzz2VdIYeVQm

The world’s most famous artist has a new piece, exhibited here for the first time — it consists of six large scale-model dioramas illustrating different elements of his eighty-one-day imprisonment.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174711/ai-weiwei-political-art-venice-biennale#ixzz2VdHCmkeP

Alarmed about “the number of companies recruiting young people to work for nothing,” British tax officials are forcing nine companies to pay more than $300,000 in back wages to unpaid interns. . . .
…continued at TheNation.com, HERE and at The Nation HERE

Dartmouth College students who filed a federal complaint against the school for failing to report sexual assaults are themselves being charged by the school with violating the student code of conduct.  Their crime: “failing to follow college officials’ instructions” about participating at a protest. . . .
. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

It’s a classic David and Goliath story: one man with a computer against the world’s most powerful nation.  But the real David in the Wikileaks story, according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, is not Julian Assange — it’s Bradley Manning.  Q&A at TheNation.com, HERE.
Alex Gibney’s film “We Steal Secrets” The Story of Wikileaks” opens in LA and NYC on Friday May 24.

From the Center for the Study of Dirty Wars: my Q&A with JEREMY SCAHILL – he wrote about Obama’s secret wars in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in his new book DIRTY WARS: The World is a Battlefield. It entered the New York Times bestseller list at #5 last week.
At the LA Review of Books, HERE.