Roger Ebert: “a first-rate second-rate memoirist”

Maureen Dowd writes about Roger Ebert’s memoir, and about the disfiguring surgical failures that have rendered him unable to speak, eat, or drink – the lower half of his face is pretty much gone. Despite this, Ebert is “effervescent” but overly detailed in accounts of his early life. However he has great stories to tell, and he nails the movie industry:

“Hollywood dialogue was once witty, intelligent, ironic, poetic, musical,” he says. “Today it is flat.” He mourns that “it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them.”

[Link]

Get out the level-headed vote

“… for voters of all stripes, Tuesday’s primaries should illuminate the growling face of a new fringe in American politics — and provide the incentive for level-headed voters to become enthusiastic about the midterm election.” [Link]

We always said that the Internet would bring more voices into the political conversation, that we would be “more democratic,” as though that was a good thing. But what if it’s not? What if more voices means more noise? What if it means more opportunities to give volume to lizard-brain thinking, and appeal to emotional rather than practical/intellectual levels of thinking?

Hopefully in November we’ll be voting from the cerebrum, making rational rather than emotional choices… turn out the “level-headed voters” mentioned above.