Sunday morning bonbons
Bonjour and a wonderful morning to all! On today’s menu: poached bonbons with a slice of Canadian ham and a charming Hollandaise! Here are this week’s unmissable bits from around the internets, attired in their Sunday best.
Cathy Renna : Why the Shepard murder was different
Just before 1 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2008, it will be 10 years since the death of Matthew Shepard. There is little need to recount the details the brutal beating and death of the young man from Wyoming who became an international symbol of homophobic hate. … But a decade after his senseless death, it does make sense to look at the enduring impact that Matthew’s life and death have had upon our culture, our community, and the larger political climate. … As we approach a presidential election in which the stakes could not be higher, there may be no better story that exemplifies the state of our movement.
Cathy Galvin : Annie Leibovitz: Nothing left to hide
The range of her portraiture is breathtaking: from her trademark Hollywood group shots, as lavish as any film set, to quirky conceptual pieces – Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk or John Cleese dangling from a tree – to her elegant black-and-white portraits of dancers, writers and musicians. The Queen, according to the BBC, stormed out of a session with Leibovitz at Buckingham Palace last year. In fact, she was storming in. And they’re all at it –Hollywood stars, international politicians, big corporates and magazines, all rushing towards her, ready to fly her anywhere, pay her anything, in the hope she will immortalise them. It’s formidable work, and the familiarity of it can breed contempt. The photographic critic Vicki Goldberg once said Leibovitz had captured a culture, “and what a shabby culture it is”. Leibovitz is aware of that tension: selling a cover has little to do with truth or art.
BBC News Magazine : 50 of your favourite words
49. My favourite word is sesquipedalian. From the Latin, sesquipedalis, meaning a foot-and-a-half, it means given to using long words. — Chris Howard, Morden
…which is probably a fitting adjective for…
50. I’m disposed to immediately feel dyspathy with a secretary like Shea, but after goving at his story for a while, I begin to hansardize. There’s no point in being philodoxical just because an apparently mundane subject deeply happifies another. I may stroke my natiform chin sceptically at Shea’s cachinnations, but if such things truly make him tripudiate, then who am I to be the pejorist? — Rob Stradling, Cardiff
Sean O’Hagan : McQueen and country
A friend of mine from Northern Ireland, who has seen [Steve McQueen's film] Hunger, said McQueen had ‘pulled off the impossible’ by ‘making an art film about the IRA’. When I mention the term ‘art film’, McQueen thows me a fierce look. ‘I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he says. ‘What I tried to do was make the strongest, most powerful film I could from the events and the story. It may not have the conventional narrative of most feature films but that is my way of grappling with the subject. Art has absolutely nothing to do with it.’
David Brooks : The Class War Before Palin
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Oliver Burkeman : Are you sitting uncomfortably?
The character that Sarah Silverman plays on stage and television - also called Sarah Silverman - is girlish, sincere and eager to please, but also narcissistic, bigoted and, in Silverman’s words, “kind of an asshole”. There’s no topic on which she doesn’t believe she has something to contribute: race, the Holocaust, rape, gay rights and global poverty all fall victim to her mistaken belief that she is an exemplary concerned citizen. Take the Aids crisis: “If we can put a man on the moon,” Silverman deadpans, as if embarking on a well-worn platitude, “we can put a man with Aids on the moon. And someday, we can put everyone with Aids on the moon.” She speaks earnestly, inviting you to empathise with the difficulties of being a good liberal in this day and age: “I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving.”
Scott Ritter : Third-Party Blues
Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years. During the time before the election, both candidates will do their best to woo the American people. McCain will base his courtship on the false promise of security, and his exaggerated sense of duty-driven purpose that he claims he alone can provide. Barack Obama can trump John McCain’s militaristic vision of American greatness by returning to his own core values, those which inspired America and breathed life into the audacity of hope. But to do this he will need to re-engage on the issue of national security in a manner which clearly sets himself apart from McCain.
Richard Rayner : The Truman show
“Dearest Cecil,” wrote Truman Capote from Brooklyn on April 19, 1965, addressing his friend, the English photographer and bon vivant Cecil Beaton. The letter is among those collected in ”Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote” (Vintage: 512 pp., $16 paper). “This is just an exhausted scrawl (you owe me a letter anyway), but I wanted you and Kin to know the case is over and my book is coming out next January. Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday. I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something I will never really get over.” … But, as Capote was himself already beginning to suspect, answered prayers are sometimes those we should be most afraid of. The experience of writing and researching “In Cold Blood,” then waiting years for murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock to die before he could publish it, burned something out of him.
Paul Wachter : Why Tip?
One day in November 2006, Jay Porter, the owner of a small restaurant in San Diego called the Linkery, scheduled a staff meeting. Less than two years old, the casual farm-to-table restaurant in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of North Park had already won praise from national magazines. Nonetheless, Porter was troubled. The staff was squabbling, mainly over money: waiters were angling for better shifts and tables, and the kitchen workers didn’t feel they were getting a fair share of the profits. The bickering was typical of the restaurant business, but Porter, who is 38, had no previous industry experience. He had been a computer consultant, one who made good money but derived few other satisfactions from his job.
When he opened the Linkery, Porter said, he hoped his employees would become as emotionally invested in the venture as he was, sharing a sense of purpose and joy in their work. Now that vision seemed hopelessly naïve. “Here I was, winging it as an owner, running into these frustrations, which all boiled down to money,” Porter told me this summer. “I felt there had to be a better way.” After much thought, Porter arrived at a possible solution, which he presented to his staff on that November afternoon. “How do you feel about eliminating tipping?” he asked them.
