Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 30th/01st November 2024
Obama’s Way by Michael Lewis
“Even so, as he floated down, he felt almost calm. The night air was cool, and there was no sound, only awesome silence. He didn’t really know why he’d been sent here, to Libya, in the first place. He knew his assignment, his specific mission. But he didn’t know the reason for it. He’d never met a Libyan. Drifting high over the desert he had no sense that he was at once an expression of an idea framed late one night in the White House by the president himself, writing with a No. 2 pencil, and also, suddenly, a threat to that idea. He didn’t sense these invisible threads in his existence, only the visible ones yoking him to his torn parachute. His thoughts were only of survival. He realized, If I can see my plane exploding, and my chute in the air, so can the enemy. He’d just turned 27—one of only three facts about himself, along with his name and rank, that he was now prepared to divulge if captured…”
The CIA and Time Magazine: Journalistic Ethics and Newsroom Dissent by Simon Willet’s
“Hugh Wilford once wrote that during the Cold War it was sometimes “difficult to tell precisely where [Time and Life’s] overseas intelligence network ended, and the CIA’s began.” As Wilford and other historians have shown, a number of high profile Time Inc. journalists, including the company’s president, Henry Luce, maintained close contact with senior CIA officials, and even helped them with their propaganda efforts abroad.2 These studies have tended to emphasize the patriotic voluntarism of “Cold Warriors” in the U.S. media, like Luce, who were happy to help the U.S. government confront international communism.3 What until now has remained undocumented is the systematic cooperation between Time Inc. and the CIA for intelligence gathering purposes. When the magazines’ managers and editors became aware of a particularly interesting source, or network of sources, they would share it with the CIA. When journalists learned of major stories, their dispatches were sent directly to the CIA. When the CIA needed photographic intelligence, they often relied upon the photojournalism of Time Inc. When foreign correspondents returned to the United States, they would share what they had learned with the CIA. Indeed, it was difficult to tell apart the magazines’ sources of information from the CIA’s foreign intelligence network because, for a while at least, the former became part of the latter…”
Productivity Is a Drag. Work Is Divine. by Sara Tillinger Wilkenfeld
“What Americans colloquially call “work” divides into two categories in ancient Hebrew. Melakhi connotes creative labor, according to early rabbinic commentaries on the biblical text. This is distinct from avodah, the word used to describe more menial toil, such as the work that the enslaved Israelites perform for their Egyptian taskmasters as described in the Book of Exodus. Pirkey Avot, a third-century rabbinic treatise filled with life advice, charges its readers to “love work.” Even then, it was part of a textual tradition that distinguishes between those kinds of work we must love and those we just love to avoid. Most of the tech tools we use on a regular basis attempt to reduce our avodah: to speed up rote labor or make backbreaking tasks easier. In a perfect world, I believe, such tools would then free people up to spend more time on our Melakhi…”