In the last decade of the 20th century, Vanity Fair—in what no doubt was a well-intended nod to the rising tide of Spanish-language and Latino literature—fabricated “Las Girlfriends,” a group portrait of authors Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, and Sandra Cisneros. (I have since forgotten—probably with good reason—what the accompanying text was about.) However, President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor and the attendant bleating and bellowing from apparently drug-crazed white men reminded me what a great thing it will be to have a Latina woman (sic) on the Supreme Court. My acquaintance with Latin culture and women gives me no small admiration for women who run the gauntlet of both a matriarchal and macho social nexus. At the risk of overstating/generalizing, a smart Latina is a powerful person to behold.

I was curious to know what Vermont dairy farmer, Middlebury mentor emeritus, Bread Loaf éminence blithe Alvarez (Saving the World, In the Time of the Butterflies) thought about the Sotomayor nomination. Her response:

…Touré, reviewing Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, talked about Obama being “a post-black president.” The nation was ready to move beyond the Civil Rights paradigm, he suggested, and become a post black nation…

But are we ready yet for a post-Latino nation? Immigration reform is still in the offing, the new civil rights agenda, as of yet not going anywhere. Interesting that this Supreme Court nomination is bringing this fact to the fore. A post-black president is one thing, but a post-Latina Supreme Court justice? Female and Latina could be the double whammy!

That said, it’s through these processes (as with Obama’s campaign and election) that we find out where we really are as a nation, and in this ongoing experiment we call the United States, we have the possibility of making adjustments. So, I’m hoping Sotomayor proves as capable as Obama in navigating the tricky waters of a whole lingering infrastructure of racism and sexism as she goes through her confirmation hearings.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to listen to different pundits and politicos round their mouths around all her vowels! It’s a good thing she doesn’t have double r’s in her name that have to be rolled. That could do her in!

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 10, 2009

Annie Leibovitz is arguably the best-known photographer in the U.S.A. (Who else? Richard Avedon? Herb Ritts? Ron Gallela?) Based on years of service at hippie-qua-boomer journal Rolling Stone, where she shot 142 covers, and her ongoing work at effete boomer glossy Vanity Fair, as well as other such magazines and a plethora of ad campaigns have made Leibovitz’s celebrity images a ubiquitous staple of mainstream culture. All of which may obscure her fundamental achievement—which is to have created a body of work that succeeds, as Susan Sontag wisely observed, in accomplishing what “all photographs aspire to the condition of being memorable—that is, unforgettable.”

One of my favorites is her shot of Keith Haring nude and painted white with his signature illustrations and hieroglyphics adorning his body and the background. Or Bette Midler nude lying in a bed of roses. Of course I could go on. Leibovitz latest opus, Annie Leibovitz at Work (Random House), inter-splices her images with observations about some of her more well-known efforts (the Nixon resignation) and mild revelations from her splendid career:

The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.

If you need to read a review of At Work, Thomas Mallon’s is spot on, delivering this punch line:

“At Work” includes a picture of the photographer’s mother, Marilyn Leibovitz, shot in 1997. These days it “means more and more” to the daughter who took it, because of its honesty: “My mother is looking at me as if the camera were not there.” This is not a condition easily replicated when the photographer isn’t the subject’s flesh and blood, and it doesn’t obtain almost anywhere else in the book, which is fine, since Leibovitz’s work, apart from a 1990s foray into Sarajevo, has never really been about honesty. As “At Work” makes clear, it has been about performance and arrangement—of the highest and shiniest order.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 5, 2009

Before I picked up Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff’s (Autumn of the Moguls) new opus, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Broadway Books), I was dubious about wanting to spend untold hours finding out about the “secret” world of short-fingered vulgarian Murdoch. Or reading over 400 pages in pursuit of that knowledge. Having done some of that (reading), my initial hunch was confirmed—I suspect reading Wolff’s Vanity Fair piece on Murdoch’s pursuit and acquisition of the vaunted Wall Street Journal (reportedly the launching site for this book) and its parent company, Dow Jones, would have been more than sufficient. On the other hand, the hyperbolic dust-jacket copy—“Written in the irresistible style that only an award-winning columnist for Vanity Fair can deliver”—has a ring of truth. Somewhere in this book Wolff makes the point that media companies were creations of the late 20th century. Which is also true of media reporters (except for rarities like Liebling, Kempton, Mailer, and Thompson). And while there is now an inchoate flock of such self-serving pundits, Wolff does frequently distinguish himself in style and deed. It was one thing to make the Manhattan echo chamber of media interesting or at the least readable (which he does), but his gutsy gadfly reporting from Iraq was noteworthy and admirable.

Anyway, the predictable review babble centers around Moloch’s (as a Murdochian, mogul-like character in John Darnton’s amusing Black and White and Dead All Over is named) motives for allowing such a book and then recently attacking its veracity. Do you and I care? I thought so. No matter: Whether or not Mr. Murdoch is sufficiently illuminated, Wolff does shine some light under News Corp’s rocks, and all manner of tidbits provide entertainment and sense to what is today’s messy media jungle.

Wolff, by the way, is also a founder of Newser, a news aggregator that is far and away better than others in its category, and it includes a daily dose of Mr. Wolff’s trenchant commentary, “Off the Grid,” such as this prediction of “sort of the end of Google.” Or better yet, his explanation for the bad New York Times review of this book, bouncily titled “NYT hates Rupe (and Me).” —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 12, 2008

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