Amazing video of the last public speech of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator. For those who don’t remember that amazing stretch in 1989 when all the eastern European governments fell, Ceausescu was probably the nastiest of his cohort, and he was the only one to fall violently.
Quoth Wikipedia:
On the morning of December 21, Ceauşescu addressed a mass assembly of a hundred thousand people to condemn the uprising of Timişoara. Speaking from the balcony of the Central Committee building in the usual “wooden language”, Ceauşescu delivered a litany of the achievements of the “socialist revolution” and Romanian “multi-laterally developed socialist society”. The people, however, remained apathetic, and only the front rows supported Ceauşescu with cheers and applause…
As he was addressing the crowd from the balcony of the Central Committee building, sudden movement coming from the outskirts of the mass assembly and the sound of what various sources have reported as fireworks, bombs, or guns broke the orderly manifestation into chaos. Scared at first, the crowds tried to disperse. Bullhorns were used to spread the news that the Securitate was firing on them and that a “revolution” was unfolding, and finally the people were persuaded to join in. The rally turned into a protest demonstration and in the end a revolution emerged.
Ceauşescu, his wife, as well as other officials and CPEx members panicked, and finally Ceauşescu went into hiding inside the building. The live transmission of the meeting was interrupted, but the people who were watching had seen enough to realise that something unusual was going on.
The reaction of Ceauşescu couple is memorable, as they were staging futile attempts to regain control over the convulsing crowd using phone conversation formulas such as “Alo, Alo” (“Hello, Hello”) or Ceauşescu’s wife “advising” him how to contain the situation: “Vorbeşte-le, vorbeşte-le” (“Talk to them, talk to them”) and to the crowd “Stati liniştiti la locurile voastre” (“Sit quiet in your places”); finally Ceauşescu allowed himself to be directed inside the Central Committee building by his underlings.
Here’s the video of that last speech. The gunfire starts shortly after the 1:00 mark. The look on Ceausescu’s face is priceless. The video seems to show the government taking control again after a few minutes; it’s unclear whether the move indoors cited above takes place in the middle of this video or after its end. I don’t know Romanian well enough to tell what the crowd is chanting later on, but it seems largely supportive and not particularly revolutionary. Not that it mattered: He was shot dead four days later.
Then check out this cell-phone ad that parodies the speech:
“Maple Syrup Porn: The Making of Quebec Popular Cinema.” How everyone’s favorite francophone Canadian province, through the magic of nudie pictures, developed its own culture.
Much more about M.S.P. in this MP3 from the CBC, which focuses on the great funky music on these films’ soundtracks. I imagine Mimi la Twisteuse would approve.
The Confederate constitution, compared side by side with the American one. Useful for debunking claims that the Confederacy’s intellectual foundation was “states rights” or some such nonsense.
For a while now, I’ve been threatening to write a long boring post about the Dunning School of historians — the ones most responsible for the fictional account of the Civil War that is still taught in many public schools today. (If you were taught that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, but instead about states rights and tariff policy — or that Reconstruction was just a den of corruption until the Redeemers came along — your head has been screwed with by the southern apologetics of the Dunning School and its peers.)
A great Economist piece on the sad tale of Nauru, the most pathetic nation in the world. I remember reading about Nauru when I was about eight years old — there was a two-page spread about them in one of the volumes of the Childcraft encyclopedia I had when I was a kid. (For the record, if you’re trying to build a powerhouse dork from the ground up, giving them Childcraft is an excellent start.)
Anyway, the Childcraft article on Nauru was all about the island nation’s usefulness to Western corporations as a massive phosphate mine. (The piece in question would have been written in the 1970s, when the phosphate wealth still flowed and Nauru’s grand bargain with the world seemed wise. As the Economist piece shows, it didn’t turn out that way.)
Nauru’s perhaps the best example of what Captain Cook wrote after seeing what Western contact had done to traditional South Pacific societies: “It would have been far better for these poor people never to have known us.”
Had another story on the front page today. It’s about (surprise, surprise!) cheating:
All 699 schools suspected of cheating on the TAKS test will face a state investigation, the Texas Education Agency announced Monday.
Sort of. The word “investigation” can have many meanings.
For some schools, investigations could consist of little more than an exchange of letters. It remains to be seen how thorough investigations of 699 schools would be possible, given constraints of time and staffing.
And state officials still have no plans to seek the additional test data that would make a detailed investigation possible. For example, the state still does not know which students have the most suspicious test answer sheets.
No time for deep narratives in this week’s MP3 Monday. I’m going to post the next three tracks that show up on shuffle in iTunes. As always, the MP3s will be up for one week, so be quick with your downloading.
I said a few weeks ago that power-pop bands, as a rule, don’t age well. Teenage Fanclub may be one of the exceptions. They don’t bring quite as much noise now as they did in the Bandwagonesque days — but to be honest, they never brought much noise in the first place. They were always a polite, tuneful pop band, built on those great MOR Blake/McGinley/Love harmonies. Their most recent album, Man-Made, is one of my favorites of theirs, particularly this track (whose wash of guitars in the bridge nicely echoes the title) and the more brash “Born Under a Bad Sign.”
Found these guys on a SXSW sampler a year or so back. If you believe the Rolling Stones, circa 1971, should have forcibly stopped the evolution of music — living forever in the sort of gutbucket Southern rock they had on Exile — the Stepbrothers are the band for you. Great fun, if in limited doses. Not sure if they’re still around or not; they were/are from Austin.
Supposedly this album is the worst thing Sammy ever recorded; not being expert in the Sammy back catalog, I can’t judge. But, beyond “The Candy Man,” it sounds like a fine, if rote album. And I kinda like the faux gospel tone of “Take My Hand.”
Go read about Sammy, since you’re already on the Interwebs. He was hella interesting. Like, did you know he was half-Cuban?
“Mr. Wilson,” by Optiganally Yours. OY is a quasi-band formed around the Optigan, “an early electronic keyboard instrument designed for the consumer market. It is best remembered today for its reputation of frequent failure and its kitschy appearance and sound. The name stems from the fact that the instrument relied on pre-recorded optical soundtracks to reproduce sound.” Sort of an early sampler, in other words.
Released in 1971, its prerecorded sounds are forever stuck in the Nixon administration, making it perfect for the retro enthusiast in all of us. And there’s a great ’70s-themed video:
More OY tracks available for download here and here and here.
(Those of us who grew up in the South — and for whom a trip to frickin’ Chattanooga was the family vacation par excellence — know what I’m talking about. That place was a damned freak show. Of course it still paled in comparison to the freak show another two hours up I-75, Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg.)
1. Go to this web page and watch the video in its entirety. Your task: Count how many times the people wearing white shirts pass the ball to one another.
2. Then read this article, particularly paragraphs seven through ten.
Texas officials have released the names of 241 more schools with suspicious patterns in their test scores. But none are likely to be targeted in the upcoming round of state investigations into possible cheating.
The new list, released Friday, brings the total number of schools with suspicious scores to 699. That’s almost one-tenth of all the Texas schools that administered the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2005.
Earlier, the Texas Education Agency had released the names of only 442 schools that had at least one classroom with suspicious scores. But Caveon – the test-security company the TEA hired to look for cheaters – also looked for schools that had suspicious score patterns schoolwide. Because of differences in the ways Caveon analyzed the scores, some schools were flagged as suspicious schoolwide without raising red flags in any specific classroom.
The TEA had not asked Caveon for the schoolwide list until The Dallas Morning News revealed its existence three weeks ago.
And my column ran today, which is probably more interesting:
Of all the layers of silliness in the No Child Left Behind law, it’s hard to come up with any more poorly thought out than the “persistently dangerous schools” clause. That’s the part of the law that is supposed to identify which schools are too scary and unsafe for kids to attend. If your school makes the list, it has to give you the chance to transfer to a safer school.
This year, five Texas schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Four are in the Valley, and I’ll admit I don’t know much about them. But the fifth one is a shocker: Cypress Ridge High School in Houston.
Cypress Ridge isn’t some gritty urban school with gangbangers roaming the halls. It’s a middle-class school in the suburbs. It’s in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the biggest suburban district in the state. The area has a lot of new growth; Cypress Ridge was built only four years ago and already has 3,500 students. Its test scores are usually better than the state average. If you want to imagine a Dallas-area high school for context, Cypress Ridge’s demographics are comparable to Newman Smith High in Carrollton.
So how did Cypress Ridge get labeled “persistently dangerous”? Was there a serial killer on the loose in AP Chemistry? Nope. Just a few kids snagging pills from Dad’s medicine cabinet.
Everyone loves story time. So this week’s MP3 Monday is all about the story song — tunes that tell tales. In particular, we’re looking at one of the masters of the craft: the British band Tindersticks. As always, the MP3s will be up for one week, so be quick with your downloading.
Tindersticks were one of my favorite bands in college. I was into moody, reflective, sad stuff at the time — I was at the age where moodiness makes you feel sophisticated and adult. (It also didn’t hurt that Tindersticks were as British a band as there ever was. Another layer of sophistication to poach!)
But while most of that stuff sounds half-baked and mopey today — to my ears at least — the first two Tindersticks albums (released in 1993 and 1995) remain amazing. And while their spoken-word story songs are not always their strongest, it’s a tradition they maintained for a number of albums.
This one, “My Sister,” is gorgeous. The words are sketches of a dark life, and with good headphones on you and a little liquor in you, it’s pure beauty. “Our life was a pillow-fight. We’d stand there on the quilt, our hands clenched ready. Her with her milky teeth, so late for her age, and a Stanley knife in her hand. She sliced the tires on my bike and I couldn’t forgive her.”
Lyrics here. The narrator is bass player Mark Colwill, and the story is the sad tale of Harry, a big happy dog whose condition takes a turn for the worse, complete with a surprise ending. (Surprising musically, if not lyrically, since it comes only halfway through the song’s six minutes.) Originally a b-side from 1995; later released on the retrospective Working For The Man.
Lyrics here. This loungy track is the tale of the band’s second American tour and their interactions with the seedy denizens of both coasts. “We’re standing on our heads drinking sours of Crystal Schnapps. Now we’re unable to step back or forward. Swallowing a swallow, tasting it again, it’s not so unpleasant. Perhaps it’s an acquired taste. The first time, it makes you sick; then, little by little, it becomes delicious.”
Saw the greatness that is Spoon last night in Fort Worth. It was some sort of “secret” show, sponsored by a cigarette manufacturer whose name shall not be mentioned here, although I will say it is derived from an even-toed ungulate. (It’s remarkable how much the ban on most cigarette advertising has forced companies like Ungulate into lifestyle marketing — sponsoring concerts, nightclubs, and other allegedly VIP experiences.)
Anyway, it was a fine show, even though temps inside the Ridglea approached 2,000 degrees. Two songs that were new to me; potential titles include “Don’t Make Me A Target” and “Tune In Tokyo.” (MP3 of that first one available here.)
Of course, my attendance at a show means it’s time for another edition of Who Dat Drummer?, the special crabwalk.com game. As I wrote some time ago: “It’s my attempt, the day after attending a fine indie-rock show, to describe the appearance of the performing bands’ drummers in terms of other historical or contemporary figures. Drummers are, of course, the quiet showboats of indie rock — free to cultivate a sartorial or facial-hair strangeness, but not burdened by the attempts at prettyness required of frontmen.”
But I saw Spoon last year too, and thus have already completed a Who Dat Drummer? profile of skins-pounder Jim Eno:
Best. Japanese. Exercise. Video. Ever. (The important thing it to stick with it through the repetition; around the 1:05 mark, it gets awesome. Around 1:45 and 2:15, too.)
The Dallas Morning News said this morning it is cutting 85 jobs in the newsroom, about 17% of the editorial staff, in preparation for a major restructuring.
The paper currently counts 500 employees in editorial, including interactive.
Executives are offering voluntary buyout packages to all employees. However, if not enough people apply, management could resort to laying off staffers.
The cover story in this week’s Independent is by my friend Mary. The headline: “The French Connection: Don’t believe the dire warnings about Creole and Cajun French dying out in Acadiana.”
Oh, if only it were true!
Reading the story actually seems to contradict that headline pretty strongly. Opening scene: People speaking French — who are in their late 40s or early 50s! And there’s a 68-year-old barber who speaks French! There’s a group of people who meet at a French table at a local cafeteria once a week, many of them in their 60s!
That there are old people who still speak French isn’t new, nor is it a sign of the strength of Cajun French. It’s a sign of weakness. Those people, bless them all, will die someday.
In my own family, French was spoken about as much as English when I was a kid. We lived for a while with my great-grandmother (b. 1907), who didn’t speak a word of English. Every week or so, I’d go with my grandmother to visit her aunt and uncle, who ran a small grocery store in town but couldn’t read English. My grandmother would read them their mail. That generation in my family grew up as Cajun rice farmers; French was a big part of our lives, up through the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But old people die. And when my great-grandmother did in 1988 — around the same time that the other remaining French-only people in my family did — the language ran dry. I haven’t heard anyone in my family have a conversation in French in the last 15 years. In the years before my grandmother (b. 1932) died in 2004, I’d sometimes try speaking in French with her. She’d have a heck of a time trying because, she said, she hadn’t spoken French to anyone in so many years.
And when I try to speak French today, it always comes out Spanish.
Mary writes about the great hope of Louisiana Francophiles, the French immersion programs in a handful of area schools. I think they’re great. Were I still living down there, I’d send my (fictional) kids there. But they’re small potatoes. In Lafayette, a district with over 30,000 students, there are about 900 in French immersion. There are probably fewer than 3,000 students statewide. That’s not enough to stop the language from dying — particularly since there’s little evidence that those kids will keep speaking French outside of school.
And of those kids who are learning French, they’re learning a version other than the Cajun their grandparents spoke. The only French teacher I ever had in a Louisiana public school was Belgian. Later, in private school, I had two Parisians and three Anglo (meaning non-Cajun) teachers. That’s one of the problems with language preservation efforts in south Louisiana — they’ve relied so strongly on outsider francophones. Mary writes about “Francomix,” the French-language program on the local public-radio station in Lafayette. Its host is…from France. Some of the early 1960s francophone activists (like Raymond Rodgers) were Canadian. Feufollet — the young Cajun band often cited as a victory for immersion programs — has a lead singer who grew up in Quebec. CODOFIL still gets in trouble with Cajuns for pushing French and Belgian and Senegalese teachers on Cajun kids, who are then inspired to start “correcting” their grandparents’ “non-standard” Cajun French.
You can also see that in the 2000 census data on language use in Louisiana. The census breaks down French speakers into “French,” “Cajun [French],” and “French Creole.” Nine percent of Louisiana French speakers over age 65 identified as Cajun or Creole speakers. Only three percent of French-speaking kids ages 5 to 18 did.
Among kids ages 5 to 17, there are only 16,630 French speakers. That’s even fewer than the 20,690 in that age group who speak Spanish — in a state with a very low Hispanic population. (And that imbalance has no doubt grown substantially greater since Katrina.)
Finally, I suspect that the census numbers actually overstate the number of French-speaking kids. Remember, kids aren’t filling out the long form themselves; their parents are. I’d wager there are a disproportionate number of people who list their kids as French speakers out of pride when they’re really just taking French in school and not speaking one word of it outside class. To put it another way: I bet that, in other states, there are folks whose kids are taking Spanish or German or Latin in school but don’t mark them down as Spanish, German, or Latin speakers on the census. I’d wager that doesn’t happen as often in Louisiana.
Look, I wish it was different. I’d love south Louisiana to be truly bilingual. But it’s telling that all the regular folks that Mary finds speaking French in day-to-day life are older. For younger folks, French is a parlor trick — something a few people can break out once in a while for fun. Life isn’t lived in French for anyone under 40. And not even the best-intentioned immersion program will change that.
This isn’t a new problem. Check out this article from 1975. “Look What They’ve Done to my French, Mama: Attempts to Save Louisiana French,” goes the headline. And it’s true: People have been predicting the death of Cajun French for a long time. But the thing is, they’ve been right. Check this paragraph: “The 1970 Census showed, for example, that of the 21 parishes considered part of Acadiana, about 45 per cent of the people called French their mother tongue. In St. Martin Parish, for example, 79.1 per cent of the 32,453 inhabitants considered French their mother tongue. Even in the urban parish of Lafayette, 52.1 per cent of the 109,716 residents were French-speakers.” I don’t know the parish-by-parish breakdowns now, but the equivalent number statewide is now 4.3 percent, and I doubt there’s a single parish left that’s much over 10 percent. And 1970 wasn’t that long ago.
As for the idea that teaching kids how to speak French will save the language, that’s been tried before, too. “For the first time in years, children are speaking in French with their grandparents, since the middle generation missed out entirely on the French language,” a newspaper is quoted in the article — in 1975. That’s the year I was born. That non-French-speaking “middle generation” is now around 60 years old — they’re the ones we now think of as the most francophone folks around. And the children of 1975 don’t speak French at all.
One other quote from that article I find prescient, from someone named Richard Landry: “The French Acadian heritage will not be handed down through the ages by exposing school children to the Parisian French language in a classroom atmosphere, nor will it be handed down by a few people telling the public, through newspapers and television, that speaking French is the ‘in’ thing. A heritage is handed down by normal, everyday interaction between parents and children and friends and neighbors, in a natural setting where pride for a common land and language keep the heritage alive.”
Cajun culture isn’t going to die. The food, the music, the lifestyle, and the folkways will survive. (Cajun music, for instance, has a tremendous number of terrific young bands breathing life into the form these days, even as the oldest institutions of Cajun/zydeco die off. But that’s another post.) We’ll be different from the rest of the United States for a long, long time — or until our homes are all underwater, which ever comes first. But outside of bands singing old songs in the mother tongue, the French language isn’t going to be a big part of that, and we should be honest enough to admit it. The “dire warnings about Creole and Cajun French dying out in Acadiana” are all too true.
The first show that Devo — then known as Sextet DEVO — ever played, in 1972. That’s Mark Mothersbaugh under the monkey mask on keyboards. The Kent State audience is clearly bored, not recognizing that the band they’re watching would eventually become the other thing their alma mater is known for.
One more entry in the People Named Josh Benton Who Are Not Me Dept.:
After waking up one night in sheets teeming with tiny bugs, Josh Benton couldn’t sleep for months and kept a flashlight and can of Raid with him in bed.
“We were afraid to even tell people about it at first,” Benton said of the bedbugs in his home. “It feels like maybe some way your living is encouraging this, that you’re living in a bad neighborhood or have a dirty apartment.”
Absent from the U.S. for so long that some thought they were a myth, bedbugs are back. Entomologists and pest control professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in infestations throughout the country, and no one knows exactly why.
Although, you know, I have been having trouble sleeping lately.
If you’re among the 34,927 people who’ve emailed me that story today, yes, I’ve seen it.
How’s your geometry? Here’s a test: What equation represents the area of the shaded rectangle located inside this cube? Almost six out of 10 Texas high school students missed that question on the TAKS test this spring. Inside are the eight toughest questions on the toughest TAKS test. Can you outsmart an average 17-year-old?
I was surprised — nah, shocked — when I searched the crabwalk.com archives and found I had never even mentioned this week’s MP3 Monday focus, the great Les McCann. In the last six months, he’s been in pretty constant rotation at Chez Crabwalk.
As always, the MP3s will be up for one week, so be quick with your downloading.
Les McCann is a jazz pianist. He was pretty traditional in his early years, through the mid-1960s, but with time his music became more soulful, a little funkier, and a little “poppier.” Or, more accurately, more populist. (In other words, what would come to be known as soul-jazz.)
He started emphasizing his gruff voice more often, and in the early 1970s, added more clavinet and Moog-style keyboards. The result was a sound that took a lot from jazz fusion, but didn’t require the intellectual overhead that guys like Miles Davis were at the time.
I first heard of Les when I heard a track of his on KEXP. It sounded interesting, so I threw one of his albums of my wish list tried to remember to search him out sometime. Of course, I forgot.
But a couple years later, I bought a copy of Soul to Soul, a film of ’60s black American musicians playing a concert in Ghana; Les was one of the musicians, and my memory was triggered.
“Compared to What” was Les’ first big hit — both the single and the album went platinum. Recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969 with his regular collaborator Eddie Harris, it was of the moment — particularly the anti-Nixon lyrics. (“The President, he’s got his war / Folks don’t know just what it’s for / Nobody gives us rhyme or reason / Have one doubt, they call it treason.”) It opens with some spare modal piano that sounds almost Bill Evans-y, but after a minute or so seems to shrug off the pretense and accept itself as a groovy pop song. It’s head-bopping joy from there on.
Perhaps my favorite Les track, and the perfect example of his merger of jazz with more popular styles. (Although Nixon fans will again be disappointed.) Sounds a bit like what Stevie Wonder might have been playing circa 1972 had he been about 20 years older. The song was written by a teenager named Nat Adderley Jr., the nephew of the great Cannonball Adderley. Cannonball recorded his own version, now sadly out of print. (Nota bene: While Swiss Movement was also recorded at Montreux, this is from a different date four years later, when Les was a little more funky and a little more electric.)
Talk To The People is probably his best studio album, I’d say — it came out shortly before the aforementioned Montreux live album, so a lot of the tracks are duplicated. “Shamading” is an upbeat funk number, with that great clavinet sound; it was on record-store shelves at the same time as Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, and both guys were hitting similar territory. (Man, whatever happened to the clavinet? I have trouble thinking of a song that wouldn’t be made better with a little clavinet. Screw “more cowbell.”)
“What’s Going On” is, of course, a cover of the Marvin Gaye classic — slower and looser. Les swaps out some of the anger for a sense of resignation. I love the way that he plays the lead-in to the chorus; when you finally hear the song’s title, it’s exultant.
There’s plenty of good Les to listen to if you’re interested. Along with albums linked above, there’s Another Beginning, Comment, the more expansive Invitation to Openness, the strangely electronic Layers, and the (I think out-of-print) Bucket of Grease and Les is More.
Great piece in The Observer on Bill Buford, one of my favorite writers. His book Among The Thugs is one of my favorite pieces of ’90s nonfiction, and his refounding of Granta built a home for some of the best ’80s writers. Buford went on to be the fiction editor of The New Yorker, and his new book is about what pulled him away from that gig.
The author of the Observer piece is Tim Adams, a former Buford deputy at Granta. He wrote one of the better essays in the recent The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, which featured some promising big-name writers (Binyavanga Wainaina, Franklin Foer, James Surowiecki, Jorge Castaneda, Nick Hornby, the obligatory Dave Eggers) but ended up being a bit disappointing. (And that’s beyond the grating condescension of the title.)
Frank Zappa on Crossfire in 1986, defending rock ‘n roll. It’s really quite tremendous, actually, particularly those who think that the last few years have featured a sudden “coarsening of the public discourse.” Somewhere, Jon Stewart is laughing. Probably Dee Snider, too.
Great radio piece (MP3) from Austin’s KUT on the Kashmere Stage Band, including interviews with Conrad O. Johnson and Egon (here called by his given name, Eothen Alapatt).
It’s very funny to me that Microsoft has apparently hired Demetri Martin to be part of an upcoming marketing campaign. You see, the hiring of Demetri (a correspondent for The Daily Show) follows Apple’s hiring of John Hodgman to represent Windows in their recent “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC” commercials. And John Hodgman is, of course, himself a Daily Show correspondent.
But the amusing part to me is that I went to college with both John and Demetri. Not just the same university (Yale) — but the same undergraduate residential college (Calhoun College). Calhoun has, in any given year, about 400 students. It’s strange to think that both John and Demetri — independently selected by rival corporations to represent the same operating system after serving as non-traditional correspondents on the same late-night satirical news program — probably lived down the hall from one another.
(For the record, John was a senior when I was a freshman; Demetri was a junior. I have no memory of John, but I sort of knew Demetri — we were both history majors, so we took some classes together. Still, we’re talking maybe one or two conversations, tops.)
Unsupportable Claim Of The Day: The Daily Show, through its prominent use of Yale grads, is an overt attempt by the university to counterbalance the dominant role that Harvard graduates have traditionally had on televised comedy.
Demetri on Yale: “Take the alumni magazine, if you look in the back and see the class notes of everyone who’s still alive, it’s poetic — you can really see the trajectory of everyone’s lives. ‘So and so is just starting an international relations program at Georgetown,’ that kind of thing. When you’re first out, you’re trying to find yourself, then a few years later, everyone’s announcing their marriages and kids, and then you go back to class of ’60 or something and some guy just bought the St. Louis Cardinals. When you move back even farther, then it’s just about who’s alive and I guess a little before that, grandchildren, family.”
John on Yale: “I for one was certainly intimidated, as I had attended an experimental ‘alternative’ high school program which had many good points, but focused less on the classics of English and American Literature and more on reading One Hundred Years of Solitude as many times as possible. You would think this would at least give me a grounding in what the word ‘chthonic’ meant. But in truth, the first time one of my well-trained classmates spoke that word my brain exploded in fear. Luckily, I knew if I made it, Geo. HW Bush would be handing me 100 bars of gold at graduation with ‘Skull and Bones’ stamped on them, so I took some comfort in knowing I would always be provided for.”
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
