The Story of the ‘Story of O’
Not many authors can boast of having written a best-selling pornographic novel, much less one regarded as an erotica classic—but Pauline Réage could. Make that Dominique Aury. No: Anne Desclos. All three were the same woman, but for years the real name behind the incendiary work was among the best-kept secrets in the literary world. Forty years after the publication of the French novel ‘Histoire d’O,’ the full truth was finally made public.
God Bless You, Mr. Greybeard
The iconic anthropologist and activist on what chimpanzees tell us about our ultimate destiny, the sixth great extinction, and reasons for hope. An excerpt from Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues from The New Press. “Well, first of all, he was the very first chimpanzee who let me come close, who lost his fear. And he helped introduce me to this magic world out in the forest. The other chimps would see David sitting there, not running away, and so gradually they’d think, ‘Well, she can’t be so scary, after all.’ He had a wonderful, gentle disposition. He was really loved by other chimps; the low-ranking ones would go to him for protection. He wasn’t terribly high-ranking, but he had a very high-ranking friend, Goliath. And there was just something about him. He had a very handsome face, his eyes wide apart, and this beautiful gray beard.”
Plasticize Me
“Bodies… The Exhibition” is a for-profit traveling display of human cadavers that have been treated with a process that plasticizes tissue, allowing them to be manipulated and viewed in various states of artful dismemberment. Ostensibly the exhibition is scientific and educational in character, but given that there are no longer many mysteries within human anatomy, the most pressing questions it raises are ethical: Is posing a dead man with a tennis racket wrong? Is a failure to make specific provisions for the treatment of one’s remains the same as giving one’s body to science?
Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?
“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization.
Murder Music
Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. “In no arena is dancehall—and Jamaican society overall—more troubled than in grappling with sexual orientation. Blaring on most street corners and from car radios, dancehall’s virulent homophobia, a curdled hatred for homosexuals explicitly and pervasively articulated in the music’s lyrics and deeply entrenched in dancehall culture, foments a quotidian reign of terror against Jamaican gay people. Jamaican gays call it murder music.”
Adopting Guatemalan
Since Guatemala’s civil war, a thirty-six year struggle that started in 1960 during which a quarter of a million people were killed or “disappeared,” Guatemalan children have been adopted abroad in steadily rising numbers. The few hundred brought to the U.S. annually in the mid-nineties, when that war ended, rose to nearly five thousand in 2006, or one baby out of every one hundred and ten births that year in Guatemala. The more than twenty-six thousand Guatemalan children adopted into the United States over the past decade are not orphans without families.
By Bread Alone
Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.
The Huckster
Need to pick a good prison? Alan Ellis can help. Attorney, author, and self-publicist, Ellis is the creator of a new legal niche—one that places him in the time-honored American tradition of the fast-talking salesman.
Mars or Bust
While the aerospace community waits for February when President Obama will announce the 2011 budget, effectively setting NASA’s direction for the near future, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin agitates for a manned mission to Mars.
Interview: Elizabeth Warren
The financial watchdog on the trouble the American middle class is in, who’s responsible for it, and what needs to be done to fix it.