what I’ve been reading

Clippings keep piling up around me, even though I don’t have the energy to write about them. Here’s a taste:

[China] Earthquake Opens Gap in Controls on Media

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including a death toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and the logistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainous region with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated, sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors found themselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried to micromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major news stories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

One reporter from The Oriental Morning Post, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because the workings of the propaganda system are often treated as state secrets, described the widespread defiance as “stepping beyond the boundaries collectively.”

That shows real bravery in the face of oppression. It’s what used to be known as speaking truth to power. It’s an encouraging sign about cultural change in China to go along with the almost unbelievable economic changes that are taking place there. Fabulous business opportunities notwithstanding, China is, after all, still a place where people who are inconvenient to the regime disappear, or are disappeared. This leaves me with a little hope that there are some Chinese who are fighting for a space for freedom of expression—and accountability to the people—in the new China.

Here’s some good news on the homefront:

Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows

Anybody surprised by that? Funnily enough, yes!—a sociologist.

In 1992, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, published an influential essay suggesting that members of the post-1965 second generation might do worse than their parents, refusing to accept low-level, poorly paying jobs and adopting negative attitudes toward school and work.

But the authors of the new study found that Professor Gans’s fears have not been realized. Most of the young people studied worked in white-collar clerical or service jobs in retail and major financial services and most had achieved “real, if modest, progress over their parents’ generation.”

So much for the predictive powers of influential essays.

Here’s a disturbing portrait of what’s roiling and seething beneath the “calm” that has overtaken Lebanon in the wake of the explosive violence of the last two weeks:

Hezbollah’s brief takeover of Beirut led to brutal counterattacks in northern Lebanon, where Sunni Muslims deeply resented the Shiite militant group’s display of power. The violence energized radical Sunni factions, including some affiliated with Al Qaeda, and extremist Sunni Web sites across the Arab world have been buzzing with calls for a jihad to avenge the wounded pride of Lebanese Sunnis.

Although the crisis eased Thursday after Arab diplomats brokered a deal to restart political talks among the factions, the questions that have crippled the government for 18 months remain unresolved. It is not yet clear that enough international consensus exists among the key powers involved in Lebanon - Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the United States - for a durable power-sharing agreement.

Meanwhile, many Lebanese agree that the hardening of Sunni-Shiite animosities - reminiscent of the Muslim-Christian fault line during the country’s 15-year civil war - is likely to make any future conflict here more violent.

“The Sunni-Shiite conflict is in the open now, it’s been triggered and operationalized,” said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “This is a deep wound, and it’s going to have serious repercussions if it’s not immediately and seriously addressed.”

On another note … If you’re a Dylan fan—particularly a female fan, and of a certain age—you won’t want to miss Stephanie Zacharek’s review of Suze Rotolo’s memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s:

Face it: The art — or is it more of a science? — of dissecting Bob Dylan is a man’s game. Most of the Dylan scholars (both the smart and the lame ones), the rock critics who have collectively spent several lifetimes wrestling with his lyrics, the civilian gasbags who hold forth at dinner parties whenever his name is even mentioned, are men. I used to have an officemate who, whenever he wanted to take a break from doing actual work (which was shockingly often), would march into my office singing some random Dylan lyric and challenge me to name which song it came from. I know women who love Dylan’s music as much as anyone else does, but I’ve never met one who felt the need to be a walking, talking sack of trivia.

The cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” shows an almost unbearably young-looking couple striding toward the camera — toward the future — through a corridor of parked cars and tallish buildings laced with fire escapes. There’s slush in the street; this is New York in midwinter, after all. The guy in the picture, a skinny, nervous-looking kid, his head topped with a tall pile of curly hair, is instantly recognizable. But the girl, attractive and thoughtful looking, with a wide-open smile, holds the camera’s gaze just as intently. Dylan fans, thanks to their stockpile of important trivia, have always known that this woman’s name is Suze Rotolo. Now we know more than just her name.

Rotolo was also featured in the New York Times last weekend.

In “A Freewheelin’ Time” Ms. Rotolo walks a delicate line between not wanting to exploit her relationship with Mr. Dylan but needing to address people’s understandable curiosity about it. “Feeding the beast” is how Ms. Rotolo describes the futility of trying to gratify the endless hunger of Dylan fanatics. “When you know that someone is human, to make them godlike is disconcerting,” she said. “I’m not a rapacious Dylan junkie.”

For his part, Dylan had shown himself not at all godlike, but rather enchanted, when he wrote about Rotolo in Chronicles, Volume One:

“She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves.”

If you’re a fan and haven’t read his memoir (”volume one”), do so immediately.

Sometimes, the obituaries make for the best reading in the paper. Case in point, today’s NYT celebrates the life and work of Will Elder, inimatable inimitable artist for Mad magazine, among others:

A dead-on caricaturist with an anarchic sense of humor, Mr. Elder stuffed the backgrounds of his Madison Avenue parodies and comic-strip spoofs with inane puns, silly signs and weird characters doing strange things.

“That approach to humor seeped into the rest of the magazine and the DNA of its contributors,” said John Ficarra, the editor of Mad. “It set the tone for the entire magazine and created a look that endures to this day.”

Mr. Elder called these background fillers “chicken fat,” explaining that they were “the part of the strip that gave it some flavor but did little to advance the story line.” This layered, free-for-all approach influenced the cartoons of R. Crumb and films like “Airplane!” and the “Naked Gun” series.

Born Wolf William Eisenberg in the Bronx, Mr. Elder attended public schools and, an unimposing physical specimen, sat on the sidelines when teams were chosen for neighborhood sports. Chalk in hand, he kept score and drew caricatures, a valuable defense against bullies. “My chalk was mightier than their sticks,” Mr. VandenBergh recalled him saying.

Also, from the “America is Mean” files—on television

“Gossip Girl,” which has its season finale on Monday, explores the unnavigability of friendship. Female bonding is punctuated by the joy and disappointments of dating, but the ruling passion is power: the pride that comes with connecting with one’s ilk and asserting control, as well as the scorching pain of rejection and ridicule. Sex is easy; it’s the cliques that take time and solicitude.

and in real life:

“Park Slope isn’t even part of Brooklyn anymore,” wrote one commenter on Gothamist. “It’s seriously a lower rung of hell, filled with hateful English teachers.” And on Eater.com, one posted comment said: “Park Slope and its ilk are why NYC is becoming more and more pathetic by the day.”

Yep: community fussbudgets, whiny parents, taverns crawling with toddlers, hip watering holes edging out old-man bars. It’s everything New Yorkers love to hate about Park Slope.

Well, not everything. Check the comments on real estate blogs like Brownstoner and Curbed, or ask around. To its detractors, Park Slope is both haunt and hatchery of New York’s smuggest limousine-liberal yuppies.

It is, if I may further summarize the bad publicity, overrated and hypocritical. Its glorious brownstone blocks and jaunty cafes are awash in carpetbagger entitlement, ruled by snarling “Stroller Nazis.” The neighborhood is a ground zero of all that is twee and lame. It is, God forbid, the suburbs.

So much to hate. So little time.

So it goes.