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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore --not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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Grappling With Raymond Chandler

Entertainment
This is a plea for help, because I imagine there must be a Chandler fan or two among the Horde. I've been trying to get into The Big Sleep, but it feels like I'm more reading a script for movie than trying to grapple with a novel. There's a lot of snappy-patter back and forth, which I suspect, is the appeal.

I really liked Double Indemnity (the movie) and somehow the wit worked better there, perhaps because Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson are there to bring it to life. I find myself not really caring about the narrator or anyone else. 

UPDATE: These responses are awesome. Thank you. Everyone. I think I'm going to do a weekly thread on whatever I'm reading.

What's the Matter With Florida?

Politics
Allen West is challenging the vote count for his congressional seat. I think I see why:
The elections office has admitted making mistakes in counting the ballots, saying that there was an error in feeding memory cards from voting machines through the vote-counting system. At a press conference earlier this week, the office's supervisor, Gertrude Walker, said workers had acted in "haste" to get results out to the public on election night and that "mistakes were made." 

The Florida Secretary of State's office said it was "concerned" about the situation and intervened this week, sending a team of auditors to the office to determine what errors had been made. On Sunday, the St. Lucie Supervisor of Elections re-tabulated early votes cast between Nov. 1 and Nov. 3, which diminished Murphy's lead slightly. 

But the office said on Friday they would reexamine those ballots once again because it had found a box containing 304 early ballots cast in that time period that had not yet been counted.
The gap between West and his opponent is outside of the official number needed to trigger a recount. Still, I'd love to hear about those errors, and how you lose three hundred votes. I'm sure this isn't an abnormality. But in close elections it matters. We really need to do better.

The Effete Liberal Book Club Rises Again

Personal
Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul. Here's the space.

Kevin Durant Is a Swell Guy

Entertainment
I really thought the writing in Sam Anderson's piece in the Times Magazine on the Oklahoma City Thunder was pretty top notch:

N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped. Michael Jordan, when he wasn't busy scoring, was busy punching a teammate in the face and gambling away small fortunes. Allen Iverson, in his spare time, recorded an aesthetically and morally terrible rap album and gave an iconic speech denigrating the very notion of practice. Kobe Bryant is and shall forever be Kobe Bryant. Wilt, Shaq, Pistol Pete, Dominique, McGrady, McAdoo, Rick Barry -- it's a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it's true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

And yet there's this running theme through the piece that I found vaguely disturbing, wherein Durant is compared with a bunch of (allegedly) rougish NBA high scorers. Anderson is obviously being intentionally hyperbolic. 

But I'm not really sure what Dominique Wilkins or Shaquille O'Neal ever did that any other professional athlete didn't, or what Hakeem Olajuwan , David Robinson or Dwayne Wade (scoring champs not on the list) ever did either. I don't really know why McGrady is there either, besides making dumb promises. It looks more like a list of people who may not be good with reporters. 

Crowning that list is (of course) King James. I was one of the people that thought Lebron's exit from Cleveland and his comments after losing the Finals to the Mavs were tactless. But the kind of visceral hate he gets is incredible. 




Republicans Want 'Stuff' Too

Politics
Mitt Romney variates on a theme:
A week after losing the election to President Obama, Mitt Romney blamed his overwhelming electoral loss on what he said were big "gifts" that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics. 

In a conference call on Wednesday afternoon with his national finance committee, Mr. Romney said that the president had followed the "old playbook" of wooing specific interest groups -- "especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people," Mr. Romney explained -- with targeted gifts and initiatives...

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift," he said. "Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008." 

The president's health care plan, he added, was also a useful tool in mobilizing African-American and Hispanic voters.
There was a great deal of talk after the election of the "fever" breaking around the GOP, and the party coming to their senses. Perhaps Bobby Jindal's aggressive rebuttal evidences some of this. 

At any rate, I think it's worth noting that all political parties organize around their interests, around pay-outs, as Romney calls them. Mitt Romney, for instance, represented a coalition whose stated interests lay in expanding the policies of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, outlawing national protection for abortion, doing nothing about climate change, and decreasing the tax burden on the "makers."

This is interest-group politics. It is not a nefarious evil. It is the practice of American democracy. At least that's what it is when taken up by interest groups who are predominantly white, predominantly male, and rooted, electorally, in the old Confederacy. When the practice is taken up by a coalition of women, gays, the young and people of color, many of them tax-payers, it is suddenly deemed a "pay-out" or "stuff," as it was so recently put. 

But they too want "stuff." They want the right to discriminate against gay families. They want the right to enact poll-taxing. They want the law to force all pregnant women into labor. That many Americans disagree can only be the result of Chicago-style bribery. I win or you cheated.

About Last Night

Personal
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I wanted to thank everyone who showed up last night for the discussion at MIT with Chris Hayes. I really, really want to apologize to everyone (especially  the Uppers and Legionaries)  who weren't able to get in. I did not anticipate the crowd. We'll have video up in the next couple of days. 

The discussion was awesome.
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