Cambridge Salon BBS aggregator

Salon.com: The freshman year I couldn't handle

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:01:00 -0700

I was the shy girl in high school. The one who didn't smile or join the clubs. The one who didn't get chosen for sports teams but had everyone trying to copy off her tests. The one who was, on the inside, desperately lonely. I couldn't wait to get out of high school; I stayed in my room and studied so I could get good grades and go to college to start my "real life." When I went away, I thought I would finally be able to reinvent myself. Or perhaps invent myself for the first time.

Salon.com: "My Joy": Nightmare voyage into the Russian heartland

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:01:00 -0700

I'm startled to report that one of the darkest Russian films I've seen in a career of watching dark Russian films, Sergei Loznitsa's black-comic backwoods odyssey "My Joy," will actually play American theaters (no doubt briefly) before moving on to a somewhat longer life as a home-video cult object. This mordant, slow-motion horror film about a truck driver's journey into hell -- the title is 100 percent sardonic, maybe more so -- was the most unexpected and arresting picture in the 2010 Cannes competition. Despite what you might believe about that festival, audiences there generally flock to lighter fare, and few seemed to appreciate that "My Joy" had a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

Salon.com: Reader responses: Books you want banned

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:59:00 -0700

Earlier this week, Laura Miller and other Salon writers weighed in on books they'd like to see banned from school reading lists -- from "Lord of the Flies" ("Is it pure sadism [that makes teachers assign that book]?" asked Andrew O'Hehir) to "Ivanhoe," which went a fair way toward dulling Life editor Sarah Hepola's enthusiasm for high school English.

Salon.com: Why should marriage last forever?

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:31:00 -0700

When you live in a place with a 50 percent divorce rate, is "till death do you part" even a realistic concept? In a radical rethinking of matrimony, Mexico City's assembly is mulling a proposed civil code reform that would enable the city to issue marriage licenses with time limits.

Salon.com: Mayor Bloomberg, partner diagnose what's wrong with America: You

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:30:00 -0700

The 90,000 New Yorkers who control 99% of the city's wealth are completely segregated, geographically and intellectually, from everyone else in the city and the nation at large, so it's no surprise that they tend to be tone-deaf and blind to the inequities and frustrations and resentments of Regular Folk, but billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his charming and powerful partner Diana Taylor are really out-doing themselves in terms of blinkered elite thickheadedness these days.

Salon.com: "You Don't Like the Truth": Our first look at a Gitmo interrogation

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:31:00 -0700

In the wake of the extrajudicial killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and several other people in Yemen this week, we're faced (once again) with the realization that the United States Constitution has become a largely meaningless totem. It gets waved around enthusiastically by people on all sides of the political spectrum whenever it seems to serve their interests, but nobody pays much attention to what it actually says. Presumably President Obama, the military-intelligence establishment and the mainstream media are declaring Awlaki a special case. Thanks to the secret provisions of secret laws, he was deprived of all the rights of citizenship and not subject to the ordinary rule of law that extends back not merely to the Constitution but to the Magna Carta (at least).

Salon.com: Why Bob Menendez really can't stand Chris Christie

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:17:00 -0700

The New York Times has a piece today about the strained-to-hostile personal relationships that Chris Christie enjoys with New Jersey's two Democratic senators, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez. As the story makes clear, Christie's friction with Lautenberg is pretty straight-forward, but when it comes to Menendez, the history is a little more complicated:

Salon.com: Mississippi's Colonel Reb: Gone but not forgotten

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:02:00 -0700

Like most liberal Berkeley, Calif. residents, I am an avid follower of Southeastern Conference college football, which means I often find myself spending my lunch hour catching up on the latest news about tree poisonings in Auburn or Lane "Lame" Kiffen's cheating escapades at Tennessee. But it's just not every day that my consideration of LSU's awesome defensive line is interrupted by new revelations about the intersection of Deep South college football and the conservative right-wing campaign to demonize Barack Obama as the Socialist Bringer-of-Death.

Salon.com: What constitutes rape?

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:47:00 -0700

For nearly a decade, Carol Tracy, the executive director of the Women's Law Project, has been agitating for a change in what she describes as the FBI's "archaic" definition of rape.

Salon.com: Gene Lyons' column too far

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:25:00 -0700

Race in America is a difficult subject. When it comes to race, America has the mental maturity of a 7-year-old that, on occasion, will plug its ears with its fingers and sing "La, la, la." Being American and Negro I understand this. I don’t really have any choice but to understand it. I can’t decide that racial matters or discussions are silly because I’m actually affected. I can’t speak of it philosophically and talk racial theory because for me its NOT theory. I’m Black. This is real. End of story.