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Reading • The Chattering Classes

It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Freddie, Fannie, and Bernie Mac are a mess. Brett Favre wants to un-retire. There’s a new Batman movie.

The chattering classes are bleating and ululating. Except for Lou Dobbs—he’s braying. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Forget about it. Mugabe—bad. Darfur—what’s that? Luckily, American political tradition allows for a lack of attention to the upcoming election until after Labor Day. Good luck figuring it out even then.

The problem as I see it is—given the immense amount of effort it would require for aspirants to good and informed citizenship to personally ascertain and verify the shit-stream of what we still call information—is to find voices and visions that one finds reliable and useful. To indulge the still-popular fetish for full disclosure (and lists), here’s a list of those to whom I pay attention:

Frank Rich and Gail Collins in The New York Times
Tom Engelhardt and his various associates at The Nation Institute
Robert Scheer at Truthdig.com
Jon Lee Anderson and Alma Guillermoprieto at The New Yorker
Christopher Hitchens, variously at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair
Hendrick Hertzberg at The New Yorker

—Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008

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Reading • The Pornography of Power

By any standard Robert Scheer, who currently edits TruthDig.com, is a highly regarded journalist working within the admirable tradition of American muckraking. Bringing his 40 years as a journalist to bear on an updated amplification of Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the military-industrial complex, Scheer offers what his publisher refers to as “a manifesto for enlightened reform.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2008

» Read an excerpt from The Pornography of Power

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Friday, March 19, 2010