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Errol Morris's Commencement address to the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism →

Basically guaranteed to be great. Filed to read soon.

I think this warrants a “wow.”

"‘Yes, yes, Hemingway,’ she said. ‘But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.’ I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated."

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast [p.12].

"To me this film would be as awful and haunting as cell phone videos of real death, and seeing violence of this kind, even if it’s passed off as art, is a kind of voyeurism I just don’t want to participate in. Violence in communities of color must be discussed, but it will never be entertainment."

—

Julianne Hing, on the new film ‘Precious,’ over at ColorLines.

Pastor Molly preached on this last year, acknowledging that although she consumes it and although media violence may not beget real violence, there is a “soul-shaking disconnect” between the “real violence we condemn and the fake violence we consume.” Violence in our lives is muffled, “by distance and by euphemisms,” and I wonder if ‘Precious,’ and its mass marketing isn’t more of the same.

How do we walk in the way? Molly didn’t have any answers, but she thinks about this topic a lot and I recommend her sermon to you.

"For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding." →

Times editorial from Ali Soufan, FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005.

Supreme Court to conference on Al-Marri this week

For a while now, the “season” whose statistics, subplots, and relative greatness I track with the most enthusiasm is that of the Supreme Court of the United States, and we are in the thick of things this year.

Although it’s invigorating to see that this court found in favor of a consumer (a consumer!) in the Wyeth drug labeling case, this civil libertarian is entirely consumed by Al-Marri v. Spagone, which was just featured in a great piece in the New Yorker.

Al-Marri is the ultimate test of Bush-era indefinite detention holdings, which have represented perhaps the most shameful abrogation of American values since 2001. The Obama administration did the right thing (the right thing!) by indicting him on criminal charges and beginning a path towards justice this week, as you likely heard. They’re doing the wrong thing, and perhaps attempting to hold onto illegally broad detention powers, by using the fact of that indictment to attempt to push Al-Marri’s case off the Supreme Court docket.

Anyhow, all of this inane background for one piece of real news, via the SCOTUSblog: the justices will conference Friday on what to do with the case, and we’ll probably know by next week. As reported in the link, “The Court agreed in December to rule on Al-Marri’s case, and the government’s brief — if the case is not dismissed — is due March 23.”

A criminal indictment is a deeply reassuring first positive sign from Obama that he’ll do right by civil liberties, but here’s hoping that the SCOTUS steps up to the plate and begins to reign in executive authority. I could have ended with a sports metaphor there, but I didn’t want to bowl anybody over.

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Pentagon to Lift Press Ban on Coffins at Dover - It’s the little things, people.

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I love this drawing. Best contextualized by the article – from the Week in Review – A Primate Family Picnic It’s Not.

What do you do with your brand-new Neanderthal? Do you crank up the air-conditioning and keep him in an artificial Pleistocene, subsisting on leaves and berries? Or does he live in the lab, eating take-out from the cafeteria? Does he get to watch TV and use a computer? Do you make friends with him?

The Joy of Boredom →

From NPR’s (fantastic and soon to be late lamented) Day to Day, Carolyn Johnson delivers this line so straight, you’re not sure the guest host knows what’s happening:

When you’re in a state of complete restlessness you’re driven to… contemplate a larger problem, you might think of a loved one or feel some universal human feelings like homesickness, uncertainty… and it might also drive you to create something new that you couldn’t find on your cellphone or iPod just out of the pure drudgery of the moment.