Two pieces on Charlie Hebdo

The two pieces on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy that resonated with me most were this piece by Teju Cole and this comic by graphic novelist Joe Sacco on satire.

But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. The A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a neo-Nazi group that, in 1978, sought to march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence, was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just because one condemns their brutal murders doesn’t mean one must condone their ideology.

Rather than posit that the Paris attacks are the moment of crisis in free speech—as so many commentators have done—it is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen. The U.S., for example, has consolidated its traditional monopoly on extreme violence, and, in the era of big data, has also hoarded information about its deployment of that violence. There are harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly. The only person in prison for the C.I.A.’s abominable torture regime is John Kiriakou, the whistle-blower. Edward Snowden is a hunted man for divulging information about mass surveillance. Chelsea Manning is serving a thirty-five-year sentence for her role in WikiLeaks. They, too, are blasphemers, but they have not been universally valorized, as have the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

The lone follow

Two points make a straight line, as everyone knows, so I'm going to take this and this as the start of a new trend investigating whenever someone or something really famous follows one random person on social media.

I like to think perhaps this is a pastime for the powerful and famous, just testing the extent of their power, like Superman flying over a city and using his heat vision to cook someone's hitherto raw steaks on a rooftop grill, just for kicks.

Kobe Bryant's lonely imperiousness

Even at his peak, Kobe Bryant made greatness look grueling. He had every gift, every natural blessing — but he made having them look hard. He could do whatever he wanted on a basketball court, but being in charge of that kind of skill was exhausting, and the strain showed. It was as if he had to keep the Amazon flowing with nothing but his own force of will. The scorn he directed at other players — at rivals, at his own teammates — always seemed to come from a place not just of superior ability but also of superior suffering. You call that a river? He defined himself through his talent, but in the sense of someone who takes pride in carrying a heavy burden without mislaying it. He had contempt for anyone whose burden was smaller, or who didn’t take it as seriously; this was why, after he’d made something of himself, he couldn’t go on tolerating Shaq. His stringency and his ferocious responsibility to himself left him sealed inside a closed circle. People wanted to be like Mike. When Kobe came around, they wanted to get the hell out of his way.

He wasn’t humorless, nor was he above showboating. But where Michael Jordan’s little backpedaling shrug was a gift to the crowd, a way of inviting fans in, Kobe’s smirk was a provocation. Jordan knew instinctively that the final inch of dominance was earned through a certain lightness, and he cultivated it as ruthlessly as his jump shot — the tongue-waggling, the pranks at the All-Star Game, the celebrations where he wept unself-consciously or seemed to float in the air. It was theater, but it completed the aura of invincibility; here was an athlete whose supremacy was so unshakable that he could afford to act unconcerned about it. Kobe could never be unconcerned, because unlike Jordan (or LeBron, or Shaq, or Kevin Durant, or Allen Iverson), he didn’t inhabit his talent so much as angrily oversee it. His smile had a way of making moments feel more tense, of ratcheting the stakes to a level at which only he could cope with them. It wasn’t in him to be generous. If you’re Superman, you can have fun flying; if you’re the CEO of Exxon, oil is never a joke.

Those are the opening two paragraphs to a magnificent piece on Kobe Bryant by Brian Phillips. This was a money quote to me: “He made misanthropy look like a key ingredient in a team sport.” Not a single teammate invited to his wedding. Not a one.

I love that we have so much more data with which to understand the value of basketball players in a sport like basketball which has so many interaction effects (Kirk Goldsberry's piece is an exemplar of the form). But Phillips' piece is a type of piece I hope we don't lose in sportswriting, a form of exploration of the fans' emotional relationship with particular players.

Steven Soderbergh's 2014 media diet

Steven Soderbergh posted a list of everything he read and watched in 2014. His media diet is as diverse as his artistic output, and no day epitomizes that as much as Dec. 4.

Reading his list, I wished I had kept such a log myself. Is there a website or app that makes that easy? I suppose Letterboxd could have been that for movies, but apparently I haven't been using the Diary function correctly because it shows my last activity as having occurred years ago.

It's still surprising to me that there isn't a better website for tracking books I've read. I tried Goodreads, I was really hoping it would be the one, especially since Amazon bought it and most of my reading is on the Kindle, but that site is an eyesore and a mess. That Amazon hasn't built a great social network for reading, especially with their dominant market share of ebooks and their ability to track highlights across the community, is such a wasted opportunity.

Anyone have any alternatives to suggest?

Miscellany

Does retweeting your own praise make you a monster? I know what Betteridge has to say about headlines, but if by monster you mean narcissist, then yes? And on the subject of narcissism, I find it rich that people take to Twitter to complain about the narcissism of selfie sticks and then you click through to their profile and they've tweeted something like 12,000 times. Okay.

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A definitive history of fleek. Just when I was starting to work it into my language, it becomes passé. Damn you iHop.

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The best rapper alive for every year since 1979 according to Complex. The first woman appears in the most recent year, 2014. Someone had to go make this list so everyone could post their outrage in the comment thread, and Complex was the one to accept this burden on behalf of humanity.

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Is this the best board game on the planet? I have not played board games in years, but I'm going to get this and see if it rekindles my interest.

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Maybe being physically cold actually does make you more susceptible to catching a cold. Grandma and mom were right, as usual.