I missed last week, so a little catching up to do.
New Yorker, April 2 issue: Robert Caro’s account of the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson on Airforce One following JFK’s assassination is a strange, almost non sequituresque reminder of a day in history I remember vividly from my very impressionable five year-old’s memory bank. I grew up in Texas, outside of Houston, and recall being strangely ashamed of the state I had come to consider my own, despite the best efforts of the neighborhood kids to pummel me in the sandbox for being a Yankee.
Economist: the special section on the future of Cuba was fascinated. I figured it was time to get ready and smart about some big changes after the Castro brothers fade away and Venezula’s Chavez ends his paternal support of the island in the vacuum left by the Soviet decline. This section is a good solid primer. The most recent issue takes a look at the rise of China’s military.
Newsweek: the commemorative issue on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles was …. meh. I have the usual baby boomer’s sentimental investment in the Fab Four but am not what would consider a rabid fan.
Sunday New York Times: April 8. The front page piece on the friendship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and would-be GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was pretty profound on an unspoken level in terms of expatiating the unique role that business education and the management consulting culture is having on global politics and leadership. Where the military or law were once the most common crucible for a politician’s career (see John McCain and President Obama/Clinton), the rise of the technocrat in the age of the Davos Man is becoming more and more inescapable a trend.
Books On the Kindle: I finally finished Fermor’s Roumeli, a great travelogue of northern Greece from one of the best Hellenicophiles since Lord Byron and have indulged myself with another baseball book from Padre’s pitcher Dirk Hayhurst (The Bullpen Gospels) — Out of My League. It’s a slow starter, but I will abide.
Longform.org: I discovered a chilling 2000 New Yorker piece by Alec Wilkinson about Hadden Clark, the cross-dressing-cannibalistic-serial killer who used to call Wellfleet his home. For some reason the outer Cape’s unsolved murders really creep me out. From Tony Costa, the 1907s In His Garden lady-killer whom Norman Mailer drew from in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, to the Christa Worthington murder in Truro in 2002 — the Outer Cape, in all its scrub pine remoteness, has one other big unsolved mystery: the case of the Lady in the Dunes. Clark copped to that murder, but it was never conclusively pinned on him. Now the current theory is she may have been done in by Whitey Bulger. Wilkinson delivers a great piece of crime writing which reminds me to buy his book about his year on the Wellfleet police force.
