One of my few gripes about The New Yorker is that the magazine doesn’t make enough of its content available online. More than once in the past couple of months, I’ve wanted to link to an article only to find it published as an abstract only. Thankfully, this recent profile of George Clooney is on the Web in full. The opening few pages will soon be pinned to my corkboard as an example of writing to strive for. Here’s a taster from the first page, Clooney at an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking:

The event, organized by Newsweek, was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of self-analysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. “We have time for one more question,” he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis’s exalted reputation. (“You just kill it for the rest of us; we’ll take care of you, pal.”) He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner—nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny—carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama’s. Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue.

Related:
Somebody Has to Be in Control (TNY)

How times have changed. (Via Gabriel.)

Translation

1.

Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land!

CHORUS:

Sing to the Fatherland, home of the free,
Bulwark of peoples in brotherhood strong.
O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people,
To Communism’s triumph lead us on!

2.

Through tempests the sunrays of freedom have cheered us,
Along the new path where great Lenin did lead.
To a righteous cause he raised up the peoples,
Inspired them to labour and valourous deed.

CHORUS

3.

In the victory of Communism’s deathless ideal,
We see the future of our dear land.
And to her fluttering scarlet banner,
Selflessly true we always shall stand!

CHORUS

Rosh Hashanah Girl and the Jewish Robot are back, this time with a Passover music video. Happy Pesach everyone.

My far too infrequent trips to the gym normally coincide with CNN’s Situation Room starring Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty. If Wolf and Jack are to be believed, America goes down the toilet every day of the week only to reemerge each morning so that it can slip back down the toilet once again while they speculate on the sorry state of the economy and America’s incompetent politicians. If an alien landed in America and tuned in to CNN he would think that he had arrived in the worst country on earth.

I often think that it’s the kind of whingeing journalism that could only be produced in the richest, most powerful country in the world. And it gets even worse at 7pm when Lou Dobbs takes to the screen to rail against immigration and the “war on the middle class” while posing questions to his viewers that Gene Weingarten aptly summed up as: “Do you think America should forfeit its future by opening the borders to illegal, chimichanga-chomping busboys?”

It’s become so miserable lately that I have more than once ripped my headphones out of the socket and gone home feeling utterly depressed.

But it seems that Jack has finally gone too far by turning his wrath on the Chinese, describing their imports as junk and China as “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” That might seem harmless to the Situation Room’s regular audience, who are used to Jack’s liberal use of slurs. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down too well with the Chinese who have demanded an apology. (CNN, by the way, says Jack was referring only to the Chinese government as goons as thugs not its people. So that’s all right then.)

Not so long ago, Jack posed this question to his viewers: “Why do some politicians insist on sticking their feet in their mouths?” It couldn’t possibly be for the same reason commentators do, could it?

Related
China demands CNN to apologize for evil attack on Chinese people (China Central Television)
China Demands CNN Apologize for Commentary (NYT)