Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reviled, rapidly dissolving Washington DC lobby group, heralds itself as the bringer of “different and innovative tactics” to the usual Beltway brand of back room politicking. As has become abundantly clear over the past few weeks, the reality of Fwd.us is anything but that. Zuckerberg’s DC outfit has not only failed to bring anything new to its approach to the pay-to-play, back-scratching culture of Congress, but has in fact made the most cynical kind of Machiavellian horse trading into its signature style. As Branch.com CEO Josh Miller… Read More »
Mark Zuckerberg’s Flailing New Lobby Group Represents Everything That’s Wrong With DC
Within about a month of the debut of Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s new DC lobby outfit aimed at promoting immigration reform, the group is already falling apart. If this week is any indication, the meltdown will be as spectacular and ignoble as every other ill-conceived, overfunded start-up in the Valley. Fwd.us’ political problems began the way they usually do: with a cynical, too-cute-by-half strategy adopted by his Beltway proxies. Fwd.us’ approach amounted to this: buy the votes of key lawmakers by dumping money into ads in their home states on issues… Read More »
Gun Control Frustrations
You want gun control regulations in the wake of the Newtown massacre? You’re in the majority, but that’s too damn bad. Democracy! I typically stay out of the 2nd Amendment arguments because I think both sides are talking past each other. Progressives tend to forget that the 2nd Amendment was not passed to protect hunting rights, but to protect the ability of people to keep their government afraid of an uprising. Telling conservatives, “you don’t need this many bullets in an automatic magazine to hunt” is beside the point and a non-sequitor. When Sen…. Read More »
Confessions of a Hair Weave Addict
It was a long road to recognizing my racial identity crisis. I did not realize it in junior high when I basked in the glory of being told by my friends that they did not consider me black because I “wasn’t loud and didn’t talk like the other two or three black girls [in our grade.]” I did not catch a whiff of it in high school when I would spend hours of my freshman year with a test tube clamp on my nose, desperately trying to make it smaller… Read More »
What Do Civil Rights and Giant Sodas Have in Common?
I’m addicted to Coke, a complete addict. I absolutely can’t kick it. If someone offered to install a Coca-Cola drip in my home whereby it’s sugary sweetness would be pumped into my mouth with just a flick of my wrist whenever I needed a fix, I have to be honest – I would be tempted to allow it. I also recognize it is like battery acid to the inside of my body and has caused two root canals and working on a third and if I stopped drinking it I’d… Read More »
In Defense of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
[Spoiler Alert: There’s a lot of description of the movie here; if you haven’t watched it yet, you might not want to read this] Zero Dark Thirty opens with audio clips of emergency calls from September 11th, 2001. The screen is black. The calls are harrowing. The movie then jumps ahead several years and puts us in a CIA “black site,” where a prisoner is being tortured. An agent named Dan is doing most of the torturing, and a novice agent named Maya is watching. It’s all very matter-of-fact. Dan says,… Read More »
Forget About Debt Limits and Social Security, We Need to Save Romantic Comedies
Recently, Vulture writer Claude Brodesser-Akner wrote an article posing a terrifying question: “Can the Romantic Comedy Be Saved?” First, who knew the romantic comedy was in peril, and second, why does he spend fifty percent of his article questioning studio executives? In this day and age studio execs are mostly business school graduates, not Creatives who understand the subtle nuance of the Rom-Com Genre. He could have asked a bona fide Romantic Comedy Expert. What makes someone a Romantic Comedy Expert, as opposed to, say, a fan of romantic comedies?… Read More »
Lincoln and Lincoln
It has been years since history and Hollywood have had as much to say to each other – at least publicly – as they have in the last few weeks with the release and reception of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Historical movies are always closely scrutinized by scholars, regardless of the topic; if someone ever finds reason to make a biopic of Calvin Coolidge – a president famous only for being dull – we’ll hear from the Coolidge experts. Spielberg’s movie on the other hand is almost designed to raise the… Read More »
The World Begins Anew: Zapatistas Demonstrate Against the Resurrected PRI
Yesterday, the world’s tinfoil fringe thanked its various deities for the fact that their gross misunderstanding of the Mayan belief system did not in fact bring the world to an end. In Mexico itself, meanwhile, tens of thousands of people acknowledged a much more worldly significance to the date: the eve of the anniversary of the Acteal massacre 15 years ago. On December 22, 1997, close to four years after the armed insurrection by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) against the government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), militants allied with the… Read More »
After Newtown: Classroom Observations from a Mother
My daughter is a kindergartener. I came in to her classroom to help out this Tuesday after the Newtown killings. I imagined our very young group of kids would be sheltered from this horrible news as I, perhaps naively, imagined they would be sheltered from all horrible news. I was surprised to see that this was not the case. Some of the kids were totally out of control. One kid said he was going to draw his gingerbread man getting shot. “Why?” I asked. “Because I saw on the news… Read More »
