Fuel Will Fan The Next Revolutionary Flames

The Article: Why Global Fuel Prices Will Spark The Next Revolutions by Vivienne Walt in Time World.

The Text: While the demonstrators that have mobbed the streets of Amman for two weeks now are demanding the overthrown of King Abdullah — a criminal offense in Jordan — it’s not the demand for democracy that sparked their protests. Instead, thousands of Jordanians have been spurred to act by a more basic issue: the rising price of gas after the government withdrew its subsidies.

Jordanians are hardly alone in their anger. Governments across the world are attempting to wean their citizens off subsidized fossil fuels —a critical issue which environmentalists say is a big contributor to the output of carbon gases that contribute to global warming, and which have even more immediately burdened public finances the world over by an estimated total of $523 billion last year — a 30% increase over the previous year. “In a lot of emerging and developing countries you see fuel subsidies, where the government is picking up the tab,” says Helen Mountford, deputy director of the environmental directorate for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, in Paris, which represents the world’s biggest economies. “In many cases it has been put in place to help support the poor.”

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The Worst Guy Everybody Knows: The College Conservative

Often found texting in the back of any Business 101 classroom, the college conservative is upfront and unapologetic about his severely conservative beliefs. He carries the (feather)weight burden of being an upperclass white male on his shoulders (which, lest you forget, are covered by the fabric of a Ralph Lauren polo) but still finds the time to panegyrize neoliberal economics from the balcony of Daddy’s mansion. He’s insufferable, but like an antibiotic-resistant pathogen, you can never truly be rid of him.

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Understanding Capote’s Swan Dive

The Article: Capote’s Swan Dive by Sam Kashner in Vanity Fair.

The Text: Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you’re finished,” New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. “I read it, and I was absolutely horrified,” she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. “The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward . . . There was no question in anybody’s mind who it was.”

The story they were reading in Esquire was “La Côte Basque 1965,” but it wasn’t so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.

He had boasted to his friend Marella Agnelli, wife of Gianni Agnelli, chairman of the board at Fiat, that Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef. He told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen—wham!”

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2000’s: The Worst Decade For American Politics?

Good God, some of these clips are SO painful. But when Nickelback has a higher approval rating than today’s Congress, what will our favorite prickly-witted libertarians have to say about the 2010s?

Gabby Giffords On Congress’ “Exceptionalism”

Yet another shooting took place yesterday in California. Joe Biden hints at executive action on gun control. Meanwhile, Congress remains at a potentially fatal impasse thanks to unyielding ideologies and equally relentless lobbyists. Maybe it’s true that guns don’t kill people; perhaps it’s incompetent leadership.