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Longreads Guest Pick: Michael Macher on ‘Putin’s Rasputin’

Michael is the associate publisher at The Awl network.

“Earlier this week, Vladislav Surkov—also known by his nickname, the ‘gray cardinal’—resigned (i.e. was fired) from his position as a leading cabinet official in Medvedev’s government. As a character, Surkov is endlessly fascinating. On one hand he’s a ruthless political operator whose genius maneuvers have drawn comparisons to Machiavelli. On the other he’s a master ironist who has turned Russia in to his own ‘postmodern theatre’. This October 2011 profile by Peter Pomerantsev in The London Review of Books is easily one of the best things written about him and the strange state of Russian politics in general. Pomerantsev beautifully weaves together fragments of Surkov’s personal biography with broader cultural observations to make deep points about power politics in Russia. I really, really enjoyed this piece and I hope you do too.”

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May 11, 2013

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Longreads Guest Pick: Christian Lorentzen on ‘The Last White Election?’

Today’s guest pick comes from Christian Lorentzen, editor for the London Review of Books, who recommends “The Last White Election?” by Mike Davis in the New Left Review:

“Mike Davis’s essay is the most thorough analysis I’ve seen of the 2012 election and what it portends for the future. Written from outside the Washington consensusphere, it’s free of cant, and has something else you don’t much find in DC: style.”

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April 17, 2013

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“Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s Post-Scandal Playbook.” Johnathan Van Meter, New York Times Magazine.

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April 10, 2013

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“The Lie Factory.” — Jill Lepore, New Yorker

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September 18, 2012

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The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass:

To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.

“The Unpersuaded.” — Ezra Klein, New Yorker

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March 12, 2012

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On the 1988 presidential campaign:

Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these “events” they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (“They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,” the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25 debate at Wake Forest University, and, an hour and a half later, “He didn’t make any big mistakes”), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. “On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out,” the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how “poorly designed and executed” events had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign “environmental” swing through the Pacific Northwest. “At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.” A Bush adviser had been quoted: “There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.”

“Insider Baseball.” — Joan Didion, The New York Review of Books, October 1988

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January 04, 2012

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