For all the whinging about the conservative media's inability to craft quality long form journalism, there's been a lot of good stuff out there lately. Here are excerpts from four good, longish reads released in recent weeks. If you're looking for something to read on a lazy August Friday afternoon, you could do worse than one of these.
James Kirchick, "Child's Play: The fairy-tale world of Model United Nations," The Weekly Standard:
"People don’t act as their countries," a sophomore from a New York-area high school representing China complained to me during a break in his committee, UNICEF. They were discussing the plight of child soldiers, he said, and all of the countries on the committee rose up to decry it, in spite of the fact that "in real life half of these countries use kids in war." The willingness to ignore a nation’s actual record, of course, could be seen as a taste of reality, a dose of the disingenuousness of the U.N. enterprise itself. At the actual U.N, insincerity is king, and nations frequently denounce the very abuses they regularly perpetrate. Sitting in the back row of a small conference room hosting UNICEF, I listened as the delegate from the Russian Federation thundered on about how "the United States is one of two countries that have not signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child," a pleasant-sounding document that must be pointless considering all of the authoritarian, child soldier-employing, basket-case regimes that have signed it. In a moment of perhaps unintended honesty, the delegate representing the United States channeled Obama administration thinking when he responded, "We are a very bureaucratic government and it’s taking a long time, but we do want to ratify it."
Bill McMorris, "The Juggalo Cult: What I saw at the Gathering," Washington Free Beacon:
Juggalo-ism is closer to a religion than anything else. There are Juggalowedding ceremonies and funerals. Juggalos are baptized in Faygo Pop, a cheap Midwestern soda ICP throws into the crowd, take communion from one-hitters, and listen to homilies delivered by two men wearing vestments of black jeans and face paint. The stage is the Juggalos’ altar, ICP records their catechism.
ICP are marketing pioneers whose tactics have spread through the entertainment industry. They built upon their initial success with five Joker Card sequels and spent off years developing other artists: Blaze Ya Dead Homie, Twiztid, and Anybody Killa, among others. ICP popularized them, sold their albums, then added them to a supergroup called Dark Lotus, which has sold hundreds of thousands more records. If the formula doesn’t sound familiar, then you missed The Avengers.
Matt Labash, "The Dread Pony: Life as a cartoon," The Weekly Standard:
A fourth generation of MLP [My Little Pony] debuted in 2010 on the Hub, a cable network co-owned by toymaker Hasbro, who thought it a keen idea to program a slate of low-quality cartoons (like Pound Puppies andTransformers: Prime) to help hawk toy lines to susceptible children. The new MLP wouldn’t have seemed like anyone’s idea of revolutionary animation, nor was the intent to appeal to adult men. The dialogue was a bit snappier, but it was still little-girl fare, with ponies such as Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash cantering around the mythical land of Equestria with their "cutie marks" (like brands, only cuter), bantering about the magic of friendship.
Then, a curious thing happened: The Internet got a hold of it. On the website 4Chan—famous as the place where every cultural cancer goes to metastasize, from Anonymous hackers to cat-photo memes—people started posting about MLP in order to ridicule it. But a counterforce of people who seemed to like it struck back, perhaps ironically at first, but then out of genuine affection or mass psychogenic illness—nobody’s entirely sure which. Virtual blood was spilled as Internet pony fights ensued. When the dust settled, a whole new older-male fandom was born, with all the clammy, neckbearded earnestness that one sees evidenced in more traditional enclaves of obsessives—from Star Trek to anime to CPAC conventions.
CJ Ciaramella, "Riding the Motor City Struggle Bus: Bankruptcy? Don't tell that to the people of Detroit," Washington Free Beacon:
I ended the night at a dive bar on an unlit street next to a cluster of derelict apartment towers. I knew it was my kind of bar when I walked in and saw people openly flouting the city’s smoking ban.
I won’t name the bar, because No Snitching.
The bartender shrugged when I asked about the smoking ban. He knew three of the four health inspectors in the city. They had bigger problems.
"Plus, a judge or a couple D.A.’s come in here sometimes to light up big cigars," he said.
The dive’s patrons sneered at the optimism of the birthday party. They liked the city when people moved there because it was empty and weird, not because it was "up and coming."
Detroit’s "renaissance" has been foretold by the perpetual optimists for decades now, they said. In the 80s, it was the People Mover, a light-rail project that would connect downtown to the suburbs. The finished People Mover is a one-way monorail that runs in a 3-mile loop around downtown.