Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’

To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak’s own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up (“All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”) and pinch his cheeks until they were red.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct 2, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,021 words)

The Dead Roads

[Fiction] One time we roadtripped across the country with Animal Brooks, and he almost got run over by a pickup truck partway through Alberta. It was me and my twenty-year-old girlfriend Vic and him, him in his cadpat jumpsuit, Vic in her flannel logger coat and her neon hair that glowed like a bush-lamp. We’d known Animal since grade school: the north-born shitkicker, like Mick Dundee. A lone ranger, or something. Then in 2002 the three of us crammed into his ’67 Camaro to tear-ass down the Trans-Canada at eighty miles an hour. Vic and me had a couple hundred bucks and time to kill before she went back to university. That’d make it August, or just so. Animal had a way of not caring too much and a way of hitting on Vic. He was twenty-six and hunted looking, with engine-grease stubble and red eyes sunk past his cheekbones. In his commie hat and Converses he had that hurting lurch, like a scrapper’s swag, dragging foot after foot with his knees loose and his shoulders slumped.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 27, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,242 words)

Fukushima Disaster: It’s Not Over Yet

In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there were clear guidance from scientists and politicians, but here, too, contemporary Japan seems particularly vulnerable. The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to. “Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that,” says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan’s leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 9, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,437 words)

Live Television Is ‘a High-Wire Act with No Safety Net’

In the course of a few hapless days, Deley repeatedly stumbled over the names of star athletes (“the Honourable Leo Usain Bolt”) and his trackside commentators. He called Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee “the fastest man on no legs.” He invented events (“the men’s 100-metre hurdles”), forgot commercial breaks, missed links, paused for long moments to consult his script, corrected himself endlessly, asked his studio guest – the four-times Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter, Michael Johnson – whether he was a pole vaulter, and concluded one broadcast with the memorable sign-off: “So we have a gloriously sunny day here in the studio. We’ve seen some action this morning as well. Jessica Ennis. Good night.”

Author: Jon Henley
Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 3, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,508 words)

Glen Campbell: One Last Love Song

On the sleeve notes he writes: “Ghost On The Canvas is the last studio record of new songs that I plan to make. I’ve been saying it to friends and family, but now that it’s in writing it really seems final.” In June, Campbell revealed he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease six months earlier and that he was going to do a farewell tour before retiring. The announcement was shocking in its bluntness. Many of us still remember Glen Campbell as the eternally youthful hunk with huge shoulders or the naive boy-man who stars alongside John Wayne in True Grit. Glen Campbell wasn’t made for growing old.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,396 words)

UK Riots: Paul Lewis’s Five-Day Journey

Minutes later I came across a group of teenagers huddled by Edmonton Working Men’s Conservative Club. Most of them were girls, and in a state of panic. I saw they were holding a topless boy, who looked about 17. “He’s been stabbed,” one said. As soon as he was in the ambulance, his friends fled, telling police they did not want to talk to “Feds” (slang for the police). One screamed: “We hate you.” Another shouted: “You’re the reason this is happening.”

Author: Paul Lewis
Source: The Guardian
Published: Aug 12, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,509 words)

Online Commenting: The Age of Rage

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it.

Author: Tim Adams
Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 24, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,808 words)

Los 33: Chilean Miners Face Up to a Strange New World

Ever since they emerged 69 days later on the night of 12/13 October, I have been working on two BBC documentaries: about what happened while the men were down the mine—and what has happened to them and their families since. Now, as the first anniversary approaches, it is the tenacity and the suffering of the women—the wives and partners—that emerges. They and their men were certainly victims but I am not sure Lilly is right: there are certainly heroines – from Lilly herself to the many other women who have struggled ever since to keep their families together. For their men emerged famous, but changed.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,401 words)

My Lost Boy John Walker Lindh

John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour. Labelled by the American government as “Detainee 001” in the “war on terror”, John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11. #Sept11

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 10, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,451 words)

The Man Who Invented Free Love

Soon after he arrived in the United States—by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity—Wilhelm Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened “orgone energy”; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 7, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,914 words)