It’s hard not to ignore the train wreck that was last Wednesday’s Republican candidate debate. (Trying to find the World Series game before dinner in DC, I happened on the intermezzo, between the kiddy-debate and the main event.) Ryan Lizza’s piece, The G.O.P.’s Outlandish Debate Proposal for the New Yorker on November 2, provides some context for the situation as it stands now. Then there is Tierney Sneed for Talking Points Memo on November 3, with How The Debate Debacle Could Backfire On Republicans. The election is only 371 days away, and the A game ain’t playing, anywhere!
You know, I really wasn’t placed on this planet to annoy my Far Right friends. Really! That said, I must share The Transformation of David Brooks, written by Danny Funt for the Columbia Journalism Review. For most people David Brooks is the pleasant, slightly nebbish-y, tolerable conservative columnist. And for my friends who live in Wingnuttery? The worst, plain and simple, for passing himself off as a conservative when, quite obviously, he’s as liberal as every other person who can carry a coherent thought through 750 words, twice a week. My political commentary aside, the piece is an interesting and insightful look at a public person, trying to explain the world around him.
It had to happen! With marijuana on the verge of becoming a legal, recreational substance—it’s coming, soon—corporate America has it’s chompers at the ready. And that’s not making Famous Pothead Willie Nelson very happy. Read all about it in Willie Nelson’s Crusade to Stop Big Pot by Wil Hyton for New York magazine.
Following up on Class Action Lawsuits (MRW-11/2), here’s Judge Jed Rakoff’s review—titled The Cure for Corporate Wrongdoing: Class Actions vs. Individual Prosecutions—of Entrepreneurial Litigation: Its Rise, Fall, and Future by Columbia law professor John Coffee, from the New York Review of Books. The review and, for sure, Mr. Coffee’s book, offer a much deeper dive than my ~600 words.
In Defense of the True ‘Cue by Calvin Trillin, for the November 2 Food issue of the New Yorker, goes deep on the North Carolina barbecue divide. Read the piece for details and lots of pleasure. (“I’m not in a position to criticize Dan’s scholarship, since, in dealing with the pork issue in my own speech at the Barbecue Summit, I mentioned, with a similar absence of citations, the Barbecue Easement, promulgated in Missouri by the Joplin rebbe, a renowned Talmudist and pitmaster: any farm animal without scales that is subjected to slow heat from a hardwood fire for more than six hours is kosher.”) Here’s a plate of pulled pork and sliced pork shoulder from The Pit in Durham, NC.
