As boas leituras do fim de semana

Estadão: No vale-tudo póstumo, caiu na rede, é peixe Herdeiros viraram uma praga cultural, cujo poder decisório põe em risco reputações consolidadas - por Sérgio Augusto Seguindo Rubinho Barrichello no Twitter Pelo microblog, dono da mola deu a cara a tapa, mas também bateu um bocado - por Christian Carvalho Cruz NYT: Fotógrafa Annie Leibovitz está na pior: empresa cobra dela 24 milhões em dívidas: http://migre.me/4yEA Serendipity na internet: por que é tão difícil? http://migre.me/4yEi Editor abre e explica erros de informações na reportagem sobre a morte de Walter Cronkite, o paladino da precisão: http://migre.me/4yDF Neto de Hemingway mexe em Paris é uma festa e reedita! AE Hotchner, biógrafo, lamenta: http://tiny.cc/NwlEb Financial Times: Lunch with the FT: Lars von Trier

Der Spiegel: Napoleão na Rússia não foi batido pelo inverno, mas pelos piolhos: http://tinyurl.com/lttow6

Morre a lenda: Walter Cronkite (1916/2009)

Acompanhe a cobertura da morte do jornalista Walter Cronkite, lenda do telejornalismo americano, no site do New York Times. Aqui, a galeria de fotos do "The Most Trusted Man in America".

“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” - Ray Bradbury

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER Published: June 19, 2009 VENTURA, Calif. — When you are pushing 90, have written scores of famous novels, short stories and screenplays, and have fulfilled the goal of taking a simulated ride to Mars, what’s left? “Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine and I’d like to spend more time with her,” said Ray Bradbury, peering up from behind an old television tray in his den. An unlikely answer, but Mr. Bradbury, the science fiction writer, is very specific in his eccentric list of interests, and his pursuit of them in his advancing age and state of relative immobility. Continua aqui.

Novo Woody Allen leva pau no NYT

Kvetch Your Enthusiasm By A. O. SCOTT Published: June 19, 2009 Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into a meaningless universe. He sees this gorgeous blonde sitting at the bar. It’s obvious she’s never read a word of Dostoevsky, much less Kierkegaard. So he says to her, “Is it meaningless in here, or is it just me?,” and she says, “My place or yours?” I know, I know. It’s an old joke, and I didn’t tell it quite right. But that’s just my point. With material like this — a Jewish intellectual type shrugging his shoulders, looking into the camera, spitting out fancy Latinate words as if he’d just swallowed a thesaurus, while an eager young actress of the moment flits around looks sultry and clueless — execution is everything. So my problem with “Whatever Works,” the new movie from, duh, Woody Allen, is not that the premise, more or less summed up in the paragraph above, is a wee bit familiar. Rather, it’s that the delivery is off. Continua aqui.

Algumas leituras do fim de semana

No Estadão de ontem: "Origem de Deus é questão absurda" - Entrevista com John Lennox, matemático da Universidade de Oxford. Interessante, pauta e discussão raras nos jornais. http://tinyurl.com/cqlz8m Euclides da Cunha no Estadão. Texto do autor de Os Sertões, na sessão especial do Cultura que homenageia os 100 anos da sua morte. http://tinyurl.com/com4dx "Quando o homem para de pulsar" - Ao falar de neuroses em O Caráter Impulsivo, Wilhelm Reich investigou as causas de uma aparente predisposição à infelicidade http://tinyurl.com/dm2wcq "Una brasa, compañero" - Frei Betto: ele foi à Bolívia cobrir o casamento do Rei, mas queria mesmo era investigar a morte do Che http://tinyurl.com/dhrgs6 No New York Times: "Comment Is King" - Reader comments are a key part of online journalism. So why do they mostly disappoint? http://tinyurl.com/dy33cj "Slouching Towards Oblivion" - Old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology http://tinyurl.com/cakvnb Este post foi publicado primeiro no http://twitter.com/flenhart. UPDATE 17h40! No Diário Catarinense de sábado: "Um desafio permanente" - Catarinense Walmor Santos aponta os equívocos da Guerra do Contestado em livro lançado pela Record http://tinyurl.com/dgbgmt "A grife Benjamin" - Sobre usos e abusos da teoria benjaminiana na cultura contemporânea ou uma alfinetada dourada na crítica http://tinyurl.com/d5j7t2

Uma pensata sobre o Twitter e a ânsia por conectividade

Ontem li um artigo muito interessante no New York Times, escrito pela jornalista Virginia Heffernan, crítica de televisão do jornal e autora da coluna The Medium da The New York Times Magazine. Ela ficou encucada com uma declaração do escritor de ficção científica Bruce Sterling numa conferência sobre tecnologia: o símbolo mais claro de pobreza - espiritual, intelectual, etc. - em uma pessoa é a dependência de conexões: “Poor folk love their cellphones!”. Em outras palavras: "Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard." Encucante mesmo. Conheço um monte de gente que se enquadra neste perfil, e teima o mais que pode em não aderir à espiral internética enlouquecida. Leia o artigo - Let Them Eat Tweets - aqui.

O lead do dia

SHOPPING, CRAFTS Now All You Need Is Cash By MELENA RYZIK Monday, March 30, 2009 Make your own joke about what to put in it, but you can at least feel re-organized with a new wallet, from the budget version — the bright blue $12 mini at Aldo — to the less so, like Orla Kiely’s leaf-print model.

Apenas crie a revista: a HP imprime e distribui

Mais notícias sobre o mercado jornalístico americano no NYT de hoje. Não é bem sobre o mercado jornalístico, mas tem a ver. A Hewlett-Packard lançou na internet o serviço MagCloud, que disponibiliza revistas criadas por qualquer pessoa que consiga criar uma e vende para quem quiser comprar, ao preço de 20 centavos de dólar por página. A empresa se responsabiliza pela impressão e pelo envio da revista ao comprador, e espera que o MagCloud se torne o "vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube". Enquanto isso, o Magazine Death Pool continua registrando o morticínio de revistas comerciais produzidas à moda tradicional, dessas que comrpamos em bancas e saem de dentro de grandes rotativas...

NYTimes.com ganha versão global

Abri agora a newsletter do The New York Times e estava lá o anúncio do lançamento de uma nova versão do site do jornal: NYT Global Edition. Essa versão é posta no ar em parceria com o International Herald Tribune, empresa que faz parte do "império" do jornal nova-iorquino. Interessante.

Evo Morales e a folha de coca

Artigo de Evo Morales, publicado na edição de sexta-feira do New York Times, pedindo o fim de uma lei da ONU que, em 1961, equiparou a folha de coca à cocaína e deu um prazo de 25 anos para que a prática de mascar a planta fosse abolido! A Bolívia assinou a convenção em 1976. Portanto, desde 2001 todos os mascadores de coca em terras bolivianas são criminosos internacionais... Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves By EVO MORALES AYMA THIS week in Vienna, a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs took place that will help shape international antidrug efforts for the next 10 years. I attended the meeting to reaffirm Bolivia’s commitment to this struggle but also to call for the reversal of a mistake made 48 years ago. In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.” Bolivia signed the convention in 1976, during the brutal dictatorship of Col. Hugo Banzer, and the 25-year deadline expired in 2001. So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law. This is an unacceptable and absurd state of affairs for Bolivians and other Andean peoples. Continua aqui.

Sai As Benevolentes nos EUA, e a crítica racha

Parece estranho, mas o livro As Benevolentes, de Jonathan Littell, que ganhei de aniversário em 2007, editado pela Alfaguara, só começou a ser vendido nos EUA na terça-feira passada. É o que informa matéria do New York Times, que aborda a apaixonada recepção crítica do livro do americano que vive na Espanha e escreve em francês, vencedor do prêmio Goncourt. Para uns, obra-prima de gênio; para outros, "willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent”. E assim no mundo inteiro. Não lembro como a crítica analisou o livro aqui no Brasil. Li o primeiro capítulo na tela do computador, no site da editora, ainda em 2007, o que me fez pedir entusiasticamente o livro de aniversário, mas ainda não encarei o romance de quase 1000 páginas que descansa em uma estante. A minha impressão é de que "As Benevolentes" tem toda a pinta de obra-prima mesmo. É muitíssimo bem-escrito. Arrisque-se aqui.

Washington Post extingue caderno dominical de livros

A última edição impressa do caderno Book World, especializado em resenhas literárias, do jornal The Whashington Post sairá no dia 15 de fevereiro, informa o New York Times, que agora é o único grande jornal americano a dedicar um caderno inteiro na edição de domingo às resenhas e reportagens sobre livros. O motivo, claro, é a crise, o baixo número de anunciantes. O papel utilizado para a impressão do Book World vai ser aproveitado na criação de duas novas editorias, mais rentáveis. E o Book World, agora, só na internet. Washington Post’s Book World Goes Out of Print as a Separate Section By MOTOKO RICH In another sign that literary criticism is losing its profile in newspapers, The Washington Post has decided to shutter the print version of Book World, its Sunday stand-alone book review section, and shift reviews to space inside two other sections of the paper. The last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. The Post said in a statement Wednesday that in the printed newspaper Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the commentary section, and Style & Arts. Book World will occasionally appear as a stand-alone print section oriented around special themes like summer reading or children’s books. Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with The New York Times Book Review. The Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising. “The advertising in Book World didn’t justify the amount of space that we dedicated each week to books coverage,” Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Post, said in a phone interview. “But we write about books, and we will continue to write about books because they are important to our audience and our readers.” Continua aqui.

Uma proposta para salvar os grandes jornais dos EUA

A edição de ontem do NYT, que na semana passada uniu-se ao empresário mexicano Carlos Slim em um matrimônio de US$ 250 milhões, trouxe um artigo interessante e assustador ao mesmo tempo. O texto é assinado por David Swensen, chefe do setor de investimentos de Yale, e Michael Schmidt, analista financeiro da mesma universidade. Chama-se News You Can Endow e apresenta uma proposta urgente, diria até desesperada, para salvar os grandes jornais americanos: "Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities". Ou seja: transformá-los em jornais financiados por milhonários e instituições com boa saúde econômica, porque se Thomas Jefferson "was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved". O desfecho é praticamente um apelo: "Only a handful of foundations and wealthy individuals have the money required to endow, and thereby preserve, our nation’s premier news-gathering organizations. Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance." News You Can Endow “THE basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved. Although the problems that the newspaper industry faces are well known, no one has offered a satisfactory solution. But there is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down. Continua aqui.

A Era Bush em fotografias

Interessante a análise da Era Bush, feita por meio de fotografias ("Mirror, Mirror on the Wall"), publicada pelo documentarista Errol Morris ontem em sua coluna no site do NYT. Na última semana do governo de George W. Bush, Morris pediu aos editores de foto de três agências internacionais (Reuters, Associated Press e France-Presse) que escolhessem imagens "that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration". O resultado é muito bom. Abaixo, três momentos.                                                      (Tim Sloan/Agence France-Presse)                                         (Paul J. Rrichards/Agence France-Presse)                                                          (AP Photo/APTN) Leia e veja tudo aqui.

Como Pelé, Obama é o dono da bola

Começa às 13h de hoje a cerimônia de posse de Barack Hussein Obama. No NYT, o colunista Bob Herbert, negro, escreve que gostaria de ver mais gente hoje em Washington... OP-ED COLUMNIST I Wish You Were Here By BOB HERBERT And so it has happened, this very strange convergence. The holiday celebrating the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became, in the midnight hour, the day that America inaugurates its first black president. It’s a day on which smiles will give way to tears and then return quickly to smiles again, a day of celebration and reflection. Dr. King would have been 80 years old now. He came to national prominence not trying to elect an African-American president, but just trying to get us past the depraved practice of blacks being forced to endure the humiliation of standing up and giving their seat on a bus to a white person, some man or woman or child. Get up, girl. Get up, boy. Dr. King was just 26 at the time, a national treasure in a stylish, broad-brimmed hat. He was only 39 when he was killed, eight years younger than Mr. Obama is now. There are so many, like Dr. King, who I wish could have stayed around to see this day. Some were famous. Most were not. I remember talking several years ago with James Farmer, one of the big four civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century. (The others were Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) Farmer enraged authorities in Plaquemine, La., in 1963 by organizing demonstrations demanding that blacks be allowed to vote. Tired of this affront, a mob of state troopers began hunting Farmer door to door. The southern night trembled once again with the cries of abused blacks. As Farmer described it: “I was meant to die that night. They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods.” A funeral director saved Farmer by having him “play dead” in the back of a hearse, which carried him along back roads and out of town. Farmer died in 1999. Imagine if he could somehow be seated in a place of honor at the inauguration alongside Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Young. Imagine the stories and the mutual teasing and the laughter, and the deep emotion that would accompany their attempts to rise above their collective disbelief at the astonishing changes they did so much to bring about. Continua aqui.

NYT, 15/01 e 17/01

15/01 Fim da matéria E-Mail Note: ‘I Landed in the Hudson’: Sheikh Ali was waiting at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport for Matt Kane, a co-worker aboard Flight 1549, and did not know why it was late. So Mr. Ali sent an e-mail message from his BlackBerry: “Where are you?” Mr. Kane’s five-word response told the whole story: “I landed in the Hudson.” 17/01 QUOTATION OF THE DAY "My daughter said, ‘Daddy, the plane turned into a boat.’" MARTIN SOSA, who was with his family on the US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River.

Floripa é o lugar para festar - com Amy - em 2009

Edição de ontem do The New York Times trouxe uma reportagem especial da editoria de viagem intitulada "The 44 Places to Go in 2009". Os destinos estão separados por categorias, e Florianóplis é o "Top Destination" da categorias "Festas". Segundo o repórter que esteve na cidade, Floripa é o lugar mais "quente" da América Latina para fazer festa. Lá no meio da matéria, quando são apresentadas as casas noturnas, tem esse parágrafo: "Making the biggest splash is Pacha (Rodovia Maurício Sirotsky Sobrinho; 55-48-3282-2054; www.pachafloripa.com.br), part of a chain of megaclubs that opened a branch near Jurerê Internacional in November. According to one of the owners, Johnny Mansur, both Jack Johnson and Amy Winehouse are booked this year for Pacha’s 15,000-seat outdoor concert area." Leia tudo aqui.

O NYT e os candidatos à presidência: de 1860 a 2008

Uma beleza o infográfico abaixo, no site do New Yort Times. Mostra uma linha do tempo, de 1860 a 2008, com todos os candidatos à presidência dos EUA que o jornal apoiou publicamente, e se o sujeito foi eleito ou não. O jornal "perdeu" algumas eleições, mas em geral escolheu quem venceu (esteve sempre com o establishment?). Além de fotos dos candidatos, traz também um arquivo em PDF com o editorial de apoio. Duca, muito duca.

Obama para presidente, sugere o NYT

Editorial

Barack Obama for President 

After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

Leia tudo aqui.

Ora, ora, quem diria, Alan Greenspan!

Uma das chamadas de capa do New York Times de hoje:

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation 

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS 

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, told a House panel that he “made a mistake” in trusting that free markets could regulate themselves.

Leia aqui.