McSweeney’s mourns the passing of Paul La Farge, a brilliant writer, teacher, and scholar. We were lucky to publish an early novel by Paul called The Facts of Winter, and he contributed often to our Quarterly and The Believer. He was one of the most gentle and genuine of colleagues, and we miss him dearly.
My favorite memory of Paul is when we were all very young, and he lived in San Francisco in an apartment of artistic friends they called Paraffin House. I forget why—a sign they stole somewhere? It was the kind of generous, joyous bohemian life I’d come to San Francisco to find. And Paul brought me into it. His intelligence and talent were evident to the world, but his kindness is what everyone will remember.
— Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less is Lost
With apologies to Gillian Flynn. And Jim Henson.
Cool Pig. Frogs always say that’s what they want. Cool Pig is cold. Cold-blooded, that is. A feat managed by sheer willpower overriding her mammalian biology and also regular ice baths. Cool Pig never gets embarrassed by the way her Frog dances, flailing his arms in the air as if he’s experiencing a grand mal seizure. She simply smiles and karate chops the bejeezus out of the evil fast-food chain owner chasing him down for his delectable frog legs.
A big spender on right-wing causes, investor Andrew Intrater gave seed money to a group formed to oust a reform-minded district attorney.
The post George Santos Benefactor Bankrolled Group Opposing LA’s Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.
Hovertext:
I just worry kids will never know the pleasure of convincing your exhausted mother that you'll shut up in exchange for the king size candy bar and 6 pounds of Ninja Turtles episodes.
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
The post Chris Hedges: Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong appeared first on MintPress News.
Alex Williams recently wrote “What Is ‘Core PCE Services Ex-Housing’ Anyway?,” which dissects the measure that the Fed is using to get a handle on “underlying” inflation. The most interesting bit (for me) is that about 1/4 of this measure is an imputed price index, based on wages. This means that this component will track wages (giving a convenient analytical relationship) by definition.
The logic of following this measure is that the Fed convinced itself that the core (ex-food and and energy) personal consumption expenditure is the best measure of “underlying” inflation, but it turns out that the housing part of that has construction issues (too smoothed to pick up current events), and so they wanted to strip that out of the measure.
The poetry of Alex Dimitrov stays in the present. It’s the essence of contemporary. A living voice, an urbane voice, overstimulated and sweet and stylish and aware. To say it’s talkative is only to highlight the point, and point to its tradition, which is very old, older than the New York poets who embodied it, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara and others: it’s as old as the intimate cutting voice of Catullus or the troubadours of Galicia. New York is not so much the subject of Dimitrov’s work—particularly true in his latest collection, Love and Other Poems—so much as its raison d’être. Even a poem like “New York,” a catalog of places in New York the speaker has cried in, is a love poem to “the best city to cry in.” Dimitrov’s voice is casual, open aesthete, open-hearted in a way that doesn’t forgo acid worldliness. No one could call his lines naïve, and yet they record—almost can’t help themselves—moments of awe, happiness, painful clarity, or, the beauty of true feeling, up or down. In that sense, Dimitrov is a first-class artist of the art of feeling, of giving a mood a shape in language.