Tag Archives: culture

Your Weekend Longreads List on America’s Pastime

by pfyee4hn Posted on July 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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With the NBA and NHL seasons coming to their respective conclusions last month, and football still months away, baseball is the lone remaining major sport as America celebrates Independence Day. In its century and a half of existence, baseball has provided the country with a never-ending stream of heroes, villains, and plenty of folks who sit squarely in between. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite pieces of long-form journalism about America’s complicated relationship with the national pastime.

For more long stories from Mother Jones check out our longreads archive. And, of course, if you’re not following @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter yet, get on that.

Baseball Without Metaphor | David Grann | The New York Times Magazine | September 2002

Barry Bonds may have been baseball’s most feared hitter—as well as its most hated. The reigning home run king was denied entry to the Hall of Fame this year thanks to his role as the central figure in the sport’s massive steroid scandal, raising questions about what we value in athletes and their on-field accomplishments.

Perhaps no one has been more ravaged by this new machine than Barry Bonds, the most dominant player of the modern era. At the very moment when Bonds is edging closer to the all-time home-run record, when in another age he would be lionized for his grace and strength, he has become a new kind of archetype—”The poster boy for the modern spoiled athlete” and ”a symbol of baseball’s creeping greed and selfishness, complete with diamond earring.”

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu | John Updike | The New Yorker | October 1960

Another icon who had a love/hate relationship with his hometown fans, Ted Williams is considered one of the greatest hitters in Major League history even considering the seasons he missed while serving as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. His hatred for the Boston media and refusal to doff his cap to the fans became just as much a part of his legend as his batting crowns and All-Star game appearances.

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

Mourning Glory | Chris Ballard | Sports Illustrated | October 2012

Here, Ballard explores the small town of Williamsport, Md., where the deaths of two ballplayers three years apart loom large over high school baseball coach David Warrenfeltz and the rest of the local sports community.

In the months that followed, Warrenfeltz was haunted by his friend’s death. He wrestled with why this happened to Adenhart, not to him—why he was allowed to keep playing baseball when Nick couldn’t. Even years later Warrenfeltz would be driving and suddenly have to pull over, tears blurring his vision. Maybe that helps explain why he returned home after finishing college, to make a life in the place his friends once dreamed of leaving. Why he became a coach.

What’s It Like To Sing The Anthem At A Baseball Game? The Story Of One Man’s Perilous Fight | Drew Magary | Deadspin | July 2012

What could be more American than belting out the national anthem before a baseball game? It may be a minor league game, but Magary still makes it his patriotic mission to not screw up too badly.

AND THE ROCKETS’ RED GLAAAAARE …

Singing this part feels like jumping a motorcycle off a rising drawbridge. It’s just a straight crescendo, going up and up and up. If you trip anytime before “glare,” you’re fucking dead. You won’t make it.

Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System | Ian Gordon | Mother Jones | March/April 2013

Prospect Yewri Guillén died of a preventable bacterial infection at a Washington Nationals training academy in the Dominican Republic. It turns out the Nationals, along with many other MLB teams, have no certified trainers or doctors at their camps, where they risk the health of their Dominican ballplayers to bring cheap talent back to the US.

Guillén’s death is the worst-case scenario in a recruiting system that treats young Dominicans as second-class prospects, paying them far less than young Americans and sometimes denying them benefits that are standard in the US minor leagues, such as health insurance and professionally trained medical staff. MLB regulations allow teams to troll for talent on the cheap in the Dominican Republic: Unlike American kids, who must have completed high school to sign, Dominicans can be signed as young as 16, when their bodies and their skills are far less developed.

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Your Weekend Longreads List on America’s Pastime

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How Disney and Johnny Depp Dealt With "The Lone Ranger" Racism Problem

by rikkiqlyons Posted on July 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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“The Native American community…is so behind this movie, it’s fantastic,” producer Jerry Bruckheimer said in a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Bruckheimer was there promoting The Lone Ranger (Walt Disney Pictures, 149 minutes), a film released on Wednesday that he made with Gore Verbinski, a director who previously worked with Bruckheimer on the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The Lone Ranger, starring Armie Hammer as the title character and Johnny Depp as his Comanche partner Tonto, is a $250 million big-screen adaptation of the famous American western franchise of the same name. (Click here to listen to the classic Lone Ranger theme song, which you’ve probably had committed to memory since you were a kid.) The new film, and past incarnations, show the Lone Ranger and Tonto combating injustice in the Wild West. The movie has an exciting, perfectly worthwhile start and finale (each showcasing a prolonged action sequence with fast trains), but it’s ultimately dragged down by a two-hour stretch of soporific, mismanaged middle. So the film was critically panned; but it has received some surprisingly positive press coverage for something many assumed would be its primary hurdle.

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How Disney and Johnny Depp Dealt With "The Lone Ranger" Racism Problem

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Tea Partiers Explain How to Properly Celebrate the 4th of July

by olekdd3 Posted on July 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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The modern Independence Day celebration typically involves things like parades, fireworks, and backyard barbecuing. For the Tea Party Patriots, though, the 4th is a much more solemn occasion, a time for reflecting on all the history that the rest of us tend to gloss over while wilting in the summer heat over the grill. The group has helpfully provided an “Independence Day Tool Kit” with detailed instructions on how to celebrate the holiday, tea party-style.

According to the Tea Party Patriots, a proper 4th of July celebration should naturally kick off with the reading of the Declaration of Independence (or, if time is an issue, just the important parts). A prayer might also be in order, and the program outline helpfully advises that “smaller families might want to invite another family to join them.” The extra people are important because the tea partiers recommend that American families spend their day off acting out a play called Unite or Die, whose text on TPP’s website is accompanied by a pattern for making tri-corner hats out of construction paper.

Unite or Die, an Independence Day play for the whole family recommended by Tea Party Patriots. Charlesbridge

For the kids, TPP recommends “colonial games” including leapfrog and hopscotch. Once they’ve worked up an appetite jumping over each other, the kids might be ready for a colonial refreshment, such as Swamp Yankee Applesauce Cake or 1776 molasses dumplings (recipes included).

TPP’s Independence Day toolkit also includes coloring books for the kids, which illustrate the great sacrifices made by the Founders and educate children on the birth of the nation—at least from the perspective of the National Center for Constitutional Studies. The group was founded by Glenn Beck’s favorite anti-communist Mormon author, the late W. Cleon Skousen, whose work is quoted in an “Independence Day Message” that the toolkit recommends reading to holiday guests. The message conveys a rather different interpretation of the Declaration of Independence than most Americans might have come to understand. In it, for instance, Earl Taylor, the head of NCCS, declares that “Acceptance of the Declaration of Independence is Acceptance of God as Our King,” and that the founding document is a “declaration of our individual belief that God is our one and only King.”

Viewed that way, of course, the 4th of July is no longer a day for fireworks, but a religious holiday, which sort of explains TPP’s rather dour prescriptions for celebrating it. I’m guessing that not many Americans will trade their beer, burgers, and lounge chairs for colonial cakes and a few rounds of leapfrog. But hey, that’s the great thing about living in a free country: The Declaration of Independence means that the tea partiers can tell the rest of us how to celebrate the 4th, and we are free to utterly ignore them.

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Tea Partiers Explain How to Properly Celebrate the 4th of July

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

by colord8609 Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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“History is written by the victors—but told best by the shit-faced.”

So reads a title card in an episode of Drunk History, the incredibly funny new Comedy Central show adapted from the eponymous web series. The premise is simple: Comedians, writers, and barflies are fed copious amounts of booze and then asked to narrate key scenes from American history, as costumed actors such as Jack Black and Zooey Deschanel fill in with lip-synched reenactments. The TV version—whose eight-episode first season premieres Tuesday, July 9, at 10 p.m. on both coasts—includes comedian Bob Odenkirk as Richard Nixon. And one of the web episodes is a fantastic account of the friendship between Abraham Lincoln (Will Ferrell) and Frederick Douglass (Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle). Watch:

So can we trust these sodden accounts of our national heritage?

“All stories are 100 percent fact-checked in advance,” promises Derek Waters, the show’s creator, executive producer, and featured actor. Each narrator is given notes to ensure a loosely tethered historical accuracy. Once the person has internalized these morsels of the past, he or she is bar-tended to in excess, and then they’re off. “We let them say whatever they want, but we don’t want anything that’s wrong,” Waters continues. “After all, we’re learning history here.” Actually, the casual flubs provide some of the show’s most amusing moments. One soused narrator substitutes soul icon James Brown for abolitionist John Brown. And in the clip above, the narrator briefly misidentifies Frederick Douglass as actor Richard Dreyfuss, and Abe Lincoln as Bill Clinton.

The whole idea for Drunk History was born of—what else?—liberal alcohol consumption. Out on the town one night, Waters and his friend Jake Johnson (Nick on the Fox comedy New Girl) began riffing about the singer Otis Redding and the circumstances of his 1967 death in a plane crash. Johnson started drunkenly reciting an urban legend about how Redding knew he was going to die before he boarded his doomed flight.

“He kept insisting that Otis said to his girlfriend, ‘No, I’m serious, you take care of yourself!’ before he got on the plane, and I was thinking ‘Oh, this is such bullshit,'” Waters recalls. “He was having so much trouble telling a story he truly believed was true, and I just started picturing this reenactment in which Otis Redding is staring at the camera being all like, ‘Shut the fuck up, this never happened.'”

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

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The 5 Biggest Bros And 5 Biggest Hipsters in Congress

by LauraFore Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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THE BRO CAUCUS

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.): The former high school prom king, Delta Tau Delta frat boy, Randian, bowhunter, and catfish noodler has led P90X workouts in Congress and sponsored (unsuccessful) tax breaks for brewers, distillers, and boozers.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): While going stag at a South Beach foam party, Rubio realized his wife-to-be, an ex-Miami Dolphins cheerleader, was his soul mate. During a vodka shot competition on a 1996 Bob Dole campaign flight, he booted in front of future colleague Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.): During his 1997 stint on MTV’s Real World, the future tea partier napped while attending a speech by President Bill Clinton and also danced and drank beer atop a pool table in his underwear.

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.): The first member of Congress to ever bare his rock-hard six-pack on the cover of Men’s Health, Schock once complimented first lady Michelle Obama for her “buff” guns.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.): He’s buds with Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar, and his office is lined with surfboards, booze posters, and a bust of John Wayne, who Rohrabacher says taught him how to drink tequila (small glass, ice cube, lime squeeze). He dismissed American interrogators’ use of panties to pressure terrorism suspects as “hazing pranks.”

THE HIPSTER CAUCUS

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.): Her signature look, which has included a Spock ‘do with red streaks, horn-rimmed glasses, and combat boots, inspired the Rosa DeLauro Is a Fucking Hipster Tumblr. Asked about it, the gentlewoman from Connecticut cheerfully replied, “People can call me whatever they want to call me.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.): Pro-bike before it was cool, the rep from Portlandia founded the Congressional Bike Caucus in 1996. Trademark look: bow ties and bicycle-shaped, neon-hued lapel pins.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.): When Cyndi Lauper stopped by Polis’ office last spring, he served her some of the Colorado-crafted High Country Kombucha his office orders by the case. His 2009 staff retreat included yoga, a scavenger hunt, and a vegan dinner at his home (he and his partner make their own nut cheese).

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.): A bisexual nontheist who doesn’t own a TV and used to work out of coffee shops before getting elected, Sinema oversold her hipster cred when she dissed stay-at-home moms for “leeching off their husbands…That’s bullshit.”

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.): Then: ironic comedian who mocked earnestness (e.g., Stuart Smalley). Now: earnest wonk who hosts a mildly ironic annual Minnesota hot dish cook-off.

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The 5 Biggest Bros And 5 Biggest Hipsters in Congress

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After Serenading a Dictator, Jennifer Lopez Won’t Say If She’ll Keep the Fee

by Leoni Posted on July 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Gigli is no longer the most horrible thing J-Lo has ever done in her two-decade career.

Pop singer and actress Jennifer Lopez caused a stir over the weekend when news broke that she was appearing at the lavish birthday bash of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the 56-year-old president—and human-rights-quashing, personality-cult-driven dictator—of Turkmenistan. The party was thrown at a Caspian Sea resort in the oil-rich Central Asian country on Saturday night. Lopez is reportedly the first big-time Western celebrity to visit Turkmenistan, and she performed at the event, singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” before a gathering of business executives and government officials.

She of course was paid for the performance, but her publicist, Shoshanna Stone of Edge Publicity, declined to divulge much she pocketed for serenading Berdymukhamedov. With human rights activists decrying her appearance at the party and many people calling for Lopez to return the cash or donate it to an outfit that opposes repression in Turkmenistan, Stone would not say whether J-Lo—who is worth a quarter of a billion dollars—is considering such a move.

Here is video of the gig. There are some amazing fireworks at the end.

The event was hosted by the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), a state-owned Chinese oil and gas company based in Dongcheng District in Beijing that has seen its fair share of accidents and controversies. (CNPC did not respond to Mother Jones‘ multiple requests for comment.)

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After Serenading a Dictator, Jennifer Lopez Won’t Say If She’ll Keep the Fee

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A Musical Tribute to Kate McGarrigle

by dig1iti43 Posted on July 1, 2013

Mother Jones

Various Artists
Sing Me the Songs: Celebrating the Works of Kate McGarrigle
Nonesuch

Drawn from concerts in New York, London, and Toronto, and produced by Joe Boyd (also recently responsible for a terrific Nick Drake tribute), this exhilarating two-disc set commemorates the beloved Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle, who died in 2010. Participants include her longtime musical partner, sister Anna McGarrigle, plus kids Rufus and Martha Wainwright and a gaggle of friends and fans, among them Norah Jones, Jimmy Fallon, Emmylou Harris, Linda Thompson, Richard Thompson, and Broken Social Scene.

But McGarrigle’s compositions are the main reason to listen. Tender, funny and reliably clear-eyed in her portrayal of grown-up relationships, she never let heartache get in the way of a great melody or compelling narrative. If “Kiss and Say Goodbye” or “I Cried for Us” doesn’t strike a nerve, then “Tell My Sister” or “Go Leave” surely will. While the final track, Kate’s home demo of “I Just Want to Make It Last,” provides a suitably poignant coda, don’t stop there: If you’re unfamiliar with the McGarrigle sisters’ albums, there’s a host of fine songs waiting to be discovered.

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A Musical Tribute to Kate McGarrigle

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3 Modern Sirens Tackle the Greek Myths

by JoanSanderz Posted on July 1, 2013

Mother Jones

The word “music” traces back to Greek’s mousike, or “art of the Muses,” those seven goddesses presiding over song, literature, and dance. The muse Euterpe, “giver of delight,” embodied music and lyric poetry; she’d have approved of the following contemporary songbirds, for whom timeless Greek tales inspire and enrich songs about modern life and love.

Dessa
Minneapolis-based Dessa might not fit your stereotype of a rapper: Poised and contemplative, you might find her lecturing on creative writing or feminism in a college classroom, cozying up to a David Foster Wallace novel, or jotting down lyrics in the tattered Moleskine she keeps in her backpack. But that doesn’t mean her latest album, Parts of Speech, is tame. Released June 25, the album offers a potent blend of pop, R&B, and hip-hop strung together by Dessa’s sultry voice and explosive songwriting. (“Call Off Your Ghost,” which you can listen to below, is a case in point.)

Dessa is a poet and former philosophy major, so it’s no wonder Greek characters pop up in some of her songs, such as the the haunting “Beekeeper,” where she sings: “Sweet Prometheus come home / they took away our fire / and all that this scarcity promotes / is desperate men and tyrants.” (In Greek mythology, the cunning Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give to humans). “I think I go to myths because you get to import a tiny piece of the poetic tradition that you reference,” Dessa says.

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3 Modern Sirens Tackle the Greek Myths

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"White House Down": A Harsh Critique of The Military-Industrial Complex, Starring Sweaty Channing Tatum

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on June 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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White House Down
Columbia Pictures
129 minutes

“Ever heard of the military-industrial complex???” President James Sawyer (played by Jamie Foxx) asks his gun-toting protector John Cale (Channing Tatum), as the two hide in a White House elevator shaft. President Sawyer is explaining to Cale why he believes armed right-wingers have invaded and occupied the White House and begun frightening tourists and shooting government officials.

In the past few months, there’s been an emerging cinematic trend of destroying the White House. Just as 1998 saw the wide release of both Armageddon and Deep Impact, this year features the release of not one but two Hollywood action movies about terrorists miraculously overrunning the White House. In Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler (released in March), a band of North Korean fanatics take over the West Wing—with the help of a Secret Service agent who betrays America because he’s fed up with globalization and Wall Street. In White House Down (released on Friday), it’s white, American-born, ultra-conservative lunatics—who do so with the help of a Secret Service agent who betrays America because President Sawyer isn’t being militaristic enough.

The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, whose sole purpose as a filmmaker is demolishing the White House, whenever he isn’t spreading scandalously awful lies about William Shakespeare. WHD is a mixed bag of B-movie pluses and minuses. There are moments when the dialogue is so laughably terrible and the bullet-riddled situations so wildly absurd that the scenes succeed on the merits of “so-bad-it’s-good.” But those moments are too often negated by tedious, sloppily choreographed action, and generic plot points designed to be taken way more seriously than they have any right to be. Emmerich’s unwillingness to commit to a delightfully trashy tone makes for an uneven action-comedy experience at best.

And the script, penned by James Vanderbilt, is one enormous pander to the most naïve impulses of your average dime-store liberal. The president’s agenda is defined by making peace with all the Arab, Muslim, and Persian world. After forging friendly relations with Iran’s new reformist leader, President Sawyer (most definitely a Democrat) announces in a legacy-defining speech the Sawyer Doctrine—which includes the withdrawal of every single American soldier stationed in the Middle East. He sets out to convince practically every country on the planet to sign a new peace treaty, and vows to take on the US’ out-of-control, conflict-hungry defense industry and its lapdogs in Congress.

War veteran and wannabe Secret Service agent Cale admires the president’s vision. But far-right gunmen who want to wage nuclear war against Iran do not, so they conquer the White House and start killing scores of innocents. Audiences might also notice that one of the deranged right-wing insurgents is a huge fan of a cable news network that’s clearly a stand-in for Fox News. As the henchmen round up the hostages, the American terrorist spots the network’s White House correspondent, played by an actor who physically resembles Fox’s Ed Henry. The terrorist proceeds to gush about how much he loves their Sawyer-bashing coverage, and how Ed-Henry-look-alike is basically the only truth-teller in the media.

Not to spoil the entire movie, but (spoiler alert) Jamie Foxx, Channing Tatum, and the liberals win the day, and the hawkish, Fox News-adoring, reactionary killers wind up either in jail or ripped to shreds by explosives and ammunition. It’s typical Hollywood liberalism with gigantic firearms.

Now here’s one of WHD‘s trailers, which makes the movie look far better—and much more dramatic—than it is:

White House Down gets a wide release on Friday, June 28. The film is rated PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action and violence including intense gunfire and explosions, some language and a brief sexual image. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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"White House Down": A Harsh Critique of The Military-Industrial Complex, Starring Sweaty Channing Tatum

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Body wash beads contaminate the Great Lakes

by Myrna Posted on June 27, 2013

Exfoliating body wash may make you clean, but it’s making the lake water dirty. Continued here:  Body wash beads contaminate the Great Lakes ; ;Related ArticlesDeath to All Bees! (And Other Great Videos)Amaranth offers Mexicans promising corn alternativeFull Planet, Empty Plates: Chapter 5. Eroding Soils Darkening Our Future ;

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Body wash beads contaminate the Great Lakes

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