“[Rockwell’s world] is a place of safety and security, and it’s a place where there can be problems but where problems have solutions and the solutions are often provided by the people who live next door to you; if not the girl next door, then maybe the old man next door, and a doctor will take time to hear you out and will not ask you for paperwork, and will not ask you who is paying your health insurance. It’s a world where Americans will stop and pause and listen to one another and basically take care of one another. It’s a very caring place.
“I see a lot of him in the paintings. I know a lot of people keep saying to me, oh, his life was so different from his art, but I see some of his alienation in the art. If we talk about the Thanksgiving picture, for instance, ‘Freedom from Want.’ It’s interesting to me that no one in that painting is looking at anyone else. … It’s toasty warm but it also, I think, raises questions about why none of the figures are connected to one another …”
“The idea of poisoning — radioactive or otherwise — is not new to Russian intelligence. According to former Russian intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, now a historian and one-time associate of Litvinenko, the Russians have a history of substance assassination going back nearly a century. It was Lenin who ordered the establishment of their first laboratory, known simply as the ‘Special Room’, for developing new lethal toxins.
“‘There is also a long succession of poisonings by Russian intelligence services in different countries, starting in the early 1920s,’ he says.
“At its height, says Volodarsky, the Soviet Union had the largest biological warfare program in the world. Sources have claimed there were 40,000 individuals, including 9,000 scientists, working at 47 different facilities. More than 1,000 of these experts specialized in the development and application of deadly compounds. They used lethal gasses, skin contact poisons that were smeared on door handles and nerve toxins said to be untraceable. The idea, at all times, was to make death seem natural — or, at the very least, to confuse doctors and investigators. ‘It’s never designed to demonstrate anything, only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively,’ Volodarsky writes in ‘The KGB’s Poison Factory’. ‘This was an unbreakable principle.'”
The writer visits the 2013 National School Scrabble Championship, a competition between children in the fourth through eighth grade:
“The two boys have a laugh at my complaints. Frankly, I’m in a no-win situation. If I lose, I’m a loser. If I win, I’m the heartless bastard who beat two middle schoolers. Sam’s mother agrees with my assessment.
“‘Oh, you have to lose,’ she says, laughing.
“‘I know, I know.’
“But then we draw tiles and I find that I have a bingo right at the start: FlOWERS. I put it down and suddenly I have an 82-0 lead. Then I draw the Q and the Z simultaneously and put down QUIZ to take a 124-24 lead. I’m crushing it. I’m killing it. I am killcrushslaying these kids. I have no interest in decorum anymore. The game has me. I want to win because I want to win.
What if there were a flagship McDonald’s store that served all the variations of country-specific fast food items found in chains from around the world?
“Everyone talks about how globalization ‘McDonalds-izes’ the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi’an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald’s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say ‘School of Keith McNally.’ But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.”
See a collection of longreads from the 2012 Ellies, including stories from GQ, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, plus fiction from The Atlantic, VQR and more.
Increasingly there exist two societies in America: a military class, strongly religious, politically conservative, drawn disproportionately from the South and from smaller towns and areas of limited economic opportunity, including the inner cities; and an untouched civilian class consisting of everyone else, who wouldn’t know a regiment from a firmament or an M16 from a 7-Eleven. The dynamic between the two societies will become only more unhealthy. The civilian class can deploy the warriors at will, knowing that most Americans will remain unaffected. In turn, the military class can demand what it wishes, knowing that the civilians have no standing to resist.
Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience.
Among those who remember, Vaughn Meader was one of the most famous names in America for a 12-month period from 1962-1963. After that, his cultural significance evaporated almost overnight, his name thoroughly erased from public consciousness to the point of sub-trivia. To get from there to here requires a bit of doing, and a lot of bad luck. And that’s why, in an industry overrun with one-hit-wonders and flashes in the pan, Vaughn Meader may still be the single biggest crash-and-burn story in the history of showbiz.
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