Some Reading

• I was standing in line at the grocery store today and thinking about the cultural phenomenon that is the celebrity gossip magazine. Then tonight I read this article called "Inside the Committee that Runs the World" from the elite U.S. journal Foreign Policy, which focuses on a more materially important collection of people, those in charge of foreign policy in the Bush administration. But it is, at heart, a gossip piece. So what is more messed up, the fact that lots of people like to get fleeting distraction from difficult lives by dipping into glossy pictures and fabricated scandals of fabricated people who happen to have physical reality, or that it is actually useful to read this kind of quasi-academic "he said, she said" to understand a bit more about who decides who lives and who dies in the world? (Via Left is Right)
  
  
• And while we're on the world of U.S. foreign policy, here is an article from a retired intelligence official trying to make sense of what's going on with respect to the U.S. and Iran. (From AlterNet)
  
  
• Some interlinked posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) by feminst bloggers on violence against and other abuse of women by men. (Originally found via Feminist Blogs)
  
  
• An interview with the author of a book on gender in mainstream U.S. politics. It's interesting as far as it goes, but it indulges in the tendency to critique the masculinity of the other side while remaining silent about less overtly reactionary masculinities, which thereby constructs masculinity/male supremacist socialization as a whole as "their problem" rather than something that is an issue that shapes personal and political realities across ideological labels. (Via BlackFeminism.org)