NOLA celebrates

Geaux Saints!

(Via)

Jamie Foxx does D’Angelo

On the tenth anniversary, more or less, of Voodoo. It seems like the man is working again.

The Jamie Foxx bit is only funny if you’ve seen the original, which I assume you have, but if not — (warning: very … intense) — here it is.

PDF of NYU tribute to DFW

From October 2008, featuring Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Don DeLillo, DFW’s sister Amy Wallace-Havens, and others. Here it is — may require registration, I can’t tell. Here’s the main Five Dials page if you need it. Via Daring Fireball.

Werner Herzog reads Curious George

But one cannot help but wonder whether a creature of the true jungle can find actual happiness in a facsimile such as the zoo, or whether his and the other animals’ terrible nature will someday overcome the walls and attack human society from within.

(Via)

Perlstein on Wills on the bomb

A review-interview in Bookforum. Wills:

“We’re just hostage to the bomb. You know: Once we had it we had to keep it, we had to guard it, we had to deploy it—we had to have this tremendous infrastructure. It’s the same way Truman was hostage to the bomb. You know: He couldn’t not use it. And that was”—he pauses—”a power that imprisoned us. We were its servant. We had to worship at the altar of the bomb.”

The editor of “The Caribbean Review of Books” on Haiti, etc.

Trinidad-based Nicholas Laughlin, in conversation with McLemee (again):

At the moment everything going through my head is colored by the fact of Haiti. Who gets to decide what help Haiti needs and how to rebuild? I’m not sure Haitians will. Who gets to decide what contemporary Caribbean literature is? Publishers in New York and London and literary scholars in American, British, and Canadian universities. Those two questions aren’t comparable in degree, but are bound together in a common dilemma.

McLemee on Zinn

In his Inside Higher Ed column this week:

Zinn was the product of an earlier moment — one for which the stark question of commitment had priority. A strategic map of the political landscape was less urgent than knowing that you stood at a crossroads. You either joined the civil rights struggle or you didn’t. You were fighting against nuclear proliferation or the Vietnam War, or you were going along with them. It is possible to avoid recognizing such alternatives — though you do end up making the choice between them, one way or the other.

There were subtler interpretations of American history than Howard Zinn’s. Anyone whose understanding of the past begins and ends with it has confused taking a vitamin for consuming a meal. But that does not make it worthless. The appreciation of complexity is a virtue, but there are times when a moment of clarity is worth something, too.

Les auteurs font le Super Bowl

At Slate. I love Eli Manning getting the David Lynch treatment, and Werner Herzog on the ‘85 Grizzly Bears.

Tyler Cowen on Temple Grandin on autism

Here; I guess there’s a Claire-Danes-as-Temple-Grandin biopic airing on HBO tonight.

Cowen’s newish Create Your Own Economy is, among other things, “A new vision for how ‘autistic cognitive strengths’ are a major dynamic element in human history and that includes a revisionist view of the autism spectrum” (says Cowen).

I love this map

If there were 50 states of about 5.6 million people each (click for a larger version):

Bitterroot, Sabine, Great Smoky — such evocative names!

(Via James Fallows)