Sunday reading list

"Trouble in Paradise" [Vanity Fair]

Settled in 1790 by mutineers from the storied H.M.S. Bounty, Pitcairn Island is one of the British Empire’s most isolated remnants, a mystical hunk of rock that was largely ignored until 1996. Then Pitcairn’s secret was exposed: generations of rape and child molestation as a way of life. Delving into the South Pacific island’s past, the authors chronicle its 10-year clash with the British legal system, which ripped apart a tiny society.

"As Iraqis See It" [New York Review of Books]

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, when most news organizations were dutifully relaying the Bush administration's claims about the threat posed by Iraq, Knight Ridder/McClatchy ran several stories questioning their accuracy. Since the invasion, the company has run a lean but resourceful operation in Baghdad. All three of its bureau chiefs have been young Arab-American women with some fluency in Arabic. At home in the cultures of both the West and the Middle East, they have been adept at interpreting each to the other.

"8 Million Stories: Skiing New York's White Slopes" [New York Press]

The symmetry of it all felt strange, as if we were two high school girls with their older boyfriends, sneaking out of the house for a quick smooch. Soon the clothes came off, and it was clear that everyone had limp dicks from the drug, but we continued to caress and kiss for the next few hours until someone was able to eventually get it up. But it didn’t matter, it was more about the crazy randomness of it all. An invigorating way to ring in the new year.

"Left Behind: Romanticizing Germany's urban guerillas" [Boston Review]

From its founding in 1970 to its dissolution in the 1990s, the RAF robbed banks, assassinated prominent politicians, and bombed U.S. military bases, under-construction prisons, and the offices of the tabloid press. Its stated goal was to bring revolution from the third world to the first and overthrow the “fascist” Federal Republic in favor of an undefined socialist state. After the first wave of terror in the early 1970s, most of the RAF’s founding generation— including Baader, Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof—were behind bars, their successors acting on orders smuggled out through lawyers and paroled comrades.

"Darwin’s Artificial Ancestors and the Terroristic Dream of the Transparency of the Good" [International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]

As for the dustbins of history themselves, they are not so much full of events or outdated ideologies as of present events, immediately voided of their meaning by news, transformed into crusher residues, into a charnel-house of images. News is the excremental production of the event as waste; it is the current dustbin of history. There is nothing to counter the implacable rule which states that the virtual produces the real as its waste ­product. No ecology – no benevolent ecology – can do anything to stop it. It would take a maleficent ecology – one which treats evil with evil.

"Heil Woodrow!" [NY Times]

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist” all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged few. But one point was crystal clear: the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got.

UPDATE 30 December 2007; 13:15:
Be sure to read Right Truth Debbie's Sunday Reading List.