Poor David Sedaris! The recent “truth in journalism” dust-ups — John D’Agata’s bizarre book written with a former fact-checker, and the “This American Life” episode-long retraction of Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” — has given everyone a chance to call Sedaris a liar. But it’s okay that he is! Sometimes. Wait, is it? Not really. Let’s see what everyone thinks about David Sedaris.

• “No one thought that all of the workplace events recounted by David Sedaris in ‘Santaland Dairies’ were literally true.” — Matthew Baldwin.

• “I am a longtime fan of ‘This American Life,’ but I have never assumed that every story I heard was literally true. The writer and monologist David Sedaris frequently tells wonderful personal yarns on the show that may not be precisely true in every detail, but this was not a story about a family car trip gone bad.” — David Carr.

• “Artists use artistic license. No one, for example, assumes that David Sedaris’s amusing anecdotes that also air on public radio are completely factual. The standard of a monologue is not the same as the front page of The New York Times. Daisey’s argument is that his goal was to be David Sedaris, not Jayson Blair.” — Philip Bump

• “The program, which made its name with charming, small slice-of-life tales has gotten increasingly ambitious in recent years, and has begun running a number of successful investigative pieces alongside its bread-and-butter stuff from people like David Sedaris, who has a famously slippery notion of truth himself.” — Noreen Malone.

• On Mike Daisey: “This is not David Sedaris doctoring a quirky anecdote about his family.” — James Poniewozik.

• “Alex Heard picked apart David Sedaris’ embroidery of reality in his allegedly “true” radio stories and books for The New Republic, but Sedaris doesn’t pretend his work is reportage.” — Glenn Fleishman.

• “The writer-monologuist David Sedaris once told Time magazine, when asked if his works should be shelved in the fiction or nonfiction section of the bookstore: ‘Nonfiction. I’ve always been a huge exaggerator, but when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it’s 97 percent true, I think that’s true enough. I’m not going to call it fiction because 3 percent of it isn’t true.’ Try running that by a journalism ethics class.” — Chris Jones.

• “For all his lies, Sedaris remains a trustworthy writer.” — Liz Stephens.

• “I’m not shocked at all that many of the most fantastic details of Sedaris’ most beloved pieces aren’t wholly true, or even a little bit true, but this still bugs me so much.” — Rachel Maddux.

• “But fiction does not lie to us — it creates other worlds, with other rules, that, if rendered well, can tell us something true about our own world. The reader understands this, just as the reader (well, most readers, anyway) understands when reading, say, David Sedaris, that comedy inherently allows room for exaggeration, and even fabrication. (It should be noted that, at The New Yorker, when a fictional world intersects with the real world, or when comedic exaggeration seems poised to do damage, the details are fact-checked. Even in cartoons.)” — New Yorker fact-checker Hannah Goldfield.

• “It’s all pretty funny, but, like many readers, I’ve often wondered if, as advertised, it’s all true. The family stories, for the most part, never struck me as that hard to believe — the Sedaris kids seem a little tame, frankly — but every now and then, especially in Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, you come across something that sounds like a whopper flopping on the deck…. The trail was long and fascinating, and it led me to a larger question: whether ‘nonfiction’ means anything when you’re talking about humor writers who admit to flubberizing the truth for comic effect…. During our conversation, he told me he wouldn’t care a bit if he found out that Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was written by ‘some guy in Montana who made the whole thing up,’ because the tale he spins is so beautiful.” — Alex Heard, 2007.

Final NYC snow total for winter 2011/2012: 4.5 inches. We got 61 inches last year.#WelcomeToSpring

— Pat Kiernan (@patkiernan) March 19, 2012

Spring doesn’t start until tomorrow, so maybe NY1 newspaper elf Pat Kiernan is summoning down the forces of nature upon us, but if this holds up (and, yeah, it will) we will remember it as the last time we were surprised by the lack of snow. Because from now on it is nothing but fires ahead.

by Christian Brown

43. Dysfunctional Family TV Dramas
42. Dark Biographical 20th Century Period Pieces
41. Classic Goofy Musicals
40. Critically-acclaimed Underdog Dramas
39. Suspenseful Spy Movies Based on Real Life
38. Quirky Crime TV Shows
37. Feel-good Opposites-Attract Movies
36. Revenge Movies
35. Gory Action & Adventure
34. Romantic Gay & Lesbian Coming-of-age Movies
33. Critically-acclaimed Nature & Ecology Documentaries
32. Gritty Conspiracy Movies
30. Controversial Courtroom Movies
31. Campy Prison Movies
29. Understated Detective TV Shows
28. Quirky TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead
27. Biographical Tortured-Genius Movies
26. Visually-striking Scary Serial-Killer Movies
25. Romantic Independent Musicals
24. Violent Movies from the 1980s
23. Witty British TV shows
22. Suspenseful Buddy TV Shows
21. Heartfelt Biographical 20th Century Period Pieces
20. Critically-acclaimed Violent Suspenseful Movies
19. Controversial Conspiracy Documentaries
18. Emotional Period Pieces Featuring a Strong Female Lead
17. Raunchy Gay & Lesbian Comedies
16. Fight-the-System 60s Movies
15. Heartfelt Children & Family Movies
14. Steamy Romantic Foreign Movies
13. Mind-Bending Foreign Movies
12. Witty Dysfunctional-Family TV Animated Comedies
11. Suspenseful British Movies
10. Cerebral Con-Game Thrillers
9. Visually-striking Father-Son Movies
8. Violent Nightmare-Vacation Movies
7. Understated Independent Workplace Movies
6. Emotional Drug Documentaries
5. Gambling Dramas
4. Period Pieces about Royalty Based on Real Life
3. Campy Mad-Scientist Movies
2. Dinosaur TV Documentaries
1. More like Arrested Development

Christian Brown once saw his grandfather’s row of softcore Cinemax recommendations on his Netflix account, and still isn’t sure how to feel about that.

Nice! This new Nas song (co-produced by the late Heavy D!) would indicate that the excellence of last year’s “Nasty” was no fluke, and raises the hope that the new album, Life Is Good, is going to be good indeed, when it ever comes out. (He should change the album title before it does, though. Because, come on, hasn’t he read that article in Wired

, or the new report from the OECD? Life sucks.)

“In Yosemite, planes were heard 30 to 60 percent of the day. In the Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, 8 to 10 helicopters passed overhead per hour.”
 — Among the many awesome things about this story about the death of silence is that it has audio clips of bear cubs!

by Grace Bello

Tony Dekker, frontman for the Toronto-based indie folk band Great Lake Swimmers (that’s him on the far right), grew up on a farm in Wainfleet, Ontario. While he’s spent the past 12 years in Toronto and touring across North America and Europe, the songs he writes remain heavily influenced by the outdoors — and Great Lake Swimmers have a history of recording in unusual, out-of-the-way locations. But for their fifth album — the spare, beautiful New Wild Everywhere, out April 3 — for the first time the band recorded many of the songs in what Dekker calls “a proper studio.” I talked to him on the phone when, having just returned from a month-long educational expedition in Antarctica, he was back home in Toronto, preparing for SXSW and the launch of a massive North American tour.

Grace Bello: I know you had started out as a writer. So when did you know that your career would end up going more towards music?

Tony Dekker: I had actually been working for a film company for about three years before I released my first record. I had been working not a really fun job either. Just a clerical job for a film company. I actually got laid off from my job and just decided to see if I could make it work. Within a couple of months, I had been offered a European record deal from an indie label. They said, “Hey, have you ever thought about releasing this record in Europe? We want you to come over and tour.” And I thought, “Well, obviously, I really have to give this a try.”

Does that mean that, while you were working the clerical job, you were already writing songs and performing in smaller venues and stuff like that?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I played every small venue and cafe in the city of Toronto. I did that for many years before even releasing an album.

Your music is pretty closely connected with ’60s folk music. What did you grow up listening to?

When I was little kid, I grew up on a working farm. My parents always had the local radio station on. The local AM radio. It was basically just old-school country. All the stuff you can imagine. Old Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, which I love. That’s just what they had on.

You said that you write songs that have a connection to the environment. So how has growing up on a farm and visiting Thousand Islands [for the album Lost Channels] — how have those places influenced your music?

It’s definitely part of the songwriting for me. I think even from the very early albums, I feel like there’s an arc to the writing. There’s this underlying theme that runs throughout, trying to find some kind of spirituality in nature and the natural world. And also realizing there are tensions with living in a city and sort of coming to terms with those kinds of rhythms and cycles that don’t necessarily work in tandem all the time with the seasons and cycles of the natural world.

Does that mean you grew up reading Walt Whitman and Thoreau and Emerson?

Those are definitely a part of me. I studied literature when I was in school, so I definitely gravitated towards those books in particular. Definitely Emerson and Thoreau and Walt Whitman were very much cornerstones of my studies, for sure. I also really liked William Faulkner too. The kind of harsh reality that underlies the natural world, you know?

So you went to Antarctica as a mentoring artist with the Canadian nonprofit Students On Ice. What was Antarctica like?

It was such an incredible trip. The environment and the landscape was one thing, but to have the very respectful academic environment was also equally as awesome. I also felt like the students on the trip were really very bright and future leaders; if these are our future leaders, then I felt like we’re in pretty good hands. There were students from around the world. It also had this environmental slant on it. It was really a natural fit to be a part of the whole thing.

Did you get to sit in on their lesson plans?

Yeah, I did to a certain extent. I was always doing my own workshops and music while some of that was happening. Being a mentor and being a teacher and running these workshops, I didn’t always have a chance to [sit in]. It felt really good to be working alongside people in other disciplines. They had scientists that were specialists in their fields like emissions experts, videographers… It was nice that they included the arts in their program. It was really cool.

I wonder, does that mean that you plan to get into specific conservationist efforts because of that?

I think so. There was a certain synergy there already. We’ve done some work with the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, which is part of the larger Waterkeeper Alliance. It’s basically a North American program that keeps tabs on all the lakes and rivers and water systems.

You were also part of the National Parks Project; what was that experience like?

That was a really cool thing. They picked three musicians and one filmmaker to cover each of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. I was part of the group that went to Cape Breton Highlands National Park. That was such an eye-opening experience. The depth and the scope of that project was also incredible. The organizers were able to pull together and eventually release an album of songs that were recorded in all the parks and made this really great website. It really opened my mind even further; with [Great Lake Swimmers], we record in different environments, but to actually be immersed in an environment and to be writing songs — and to be co-writing songs — was a new thing for me.

So you were saying that you record in unusual places. I read that you’ve recorded in an abandoned grain silo and a church and, for one song on your new album, [an abandoned] subway station. Why did you want to record in those places specifically?

I feel there’s a different energy when we are in a space. With this new record, we had a chance to do three days of recording in a disused subway station on the Toronto Transit Line called Lower Bay Station. These natural acoustics — you can hear your voice reverberating in these places — add something special to the performance. In the past, recording in a church, taking great lengths to set up recording studios in a space rather than going into a studio where it’s already set up, it kind of adds another layer of meaning to a project. A layer of reverence for what you’re doing. I found location recording has always done that for me. You can also kind of tap into the historical and almost, I want to say, mythological aspects of a place. Especially when it came to the Thousand Islands region [where we recorded the album Lost Channels]. That whole region is such a special area. To do a survey of some interesting locations in that region was really a fascinating thing to do.

Are there any places where you would want to record? I don’t know — the Alps or some abandoned castle?

Yeah, I don’t know. We did record in Singer Castle for the last album, Lost Channels. It’s a castle built on one of the islands in Thousands Islands. If I go into a space, I’ll always be checking for acoustics. We are always on the lookout for cool places to record in.

For your new album, a lot of it was recorded in a studio, so how did that impact your recording process or your creative process?

Well, it was kind of nice to have a closed environment and really to be focused on the songwriting rather than worrying about whether it was going to happen. It almost seems like in location recordings, there’s a 50–50 chance that someone’s going to forget a cable or the conditions aren’t going to be right to record. You’re always battling the elements, to a certain extent. With this, it was nice. It almost seems like a luxury. This is our fifth record and our first time in a proper studio, I guess. It went better than I thought it would, you know? I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was really happy with how it turned out. It was a really positive experience.

What’s your songwriting process like? You said earlier that you don’t often co-write, so what’s the process like for you?

Well, songwriting generally for me is a pretty solitary thing. I’m the type of person who really needs to be alone and be as far away from other humans as possible. Definitely, getting out into nature and being inspired by that and really taking all of that in is a huge part of it for me — synthesizing or trying to get something out of the experiences that you go through, you know? Songwriting is definitely usually a very solitary thing.

Grace Bello is a freelance writer and writing teacher based in New York. Photo by Asli Alin.

One day, after my Sunday shopping excursion, walking south, I suddenly really had to pee. I raced home, dropped my groceries at my door, and ran to the bathroom to relieve myself. Two minutes, that was all it took. In two minutes I went to retrieve my groceries in the hall, and they were gone. Someone had stolen them. In fury I took out a sheet of paper and wrote in black marker, “Whoever just stole my groceries from my front door, that was my food for the week. Please return them. #5A”. I taped the sign next to my door and waited. Surely, some family member would notice the curious addition of smoked gouda or carb-conscious bread in their refrigerator and understand that a theft had occurred. I waited five minutes until my curiosity got the better of me. I opened the door and looked out. Someone had stolen the sign.

— 314 Bedford Avenue in review.

Since its founding, The New Republic has been issuing opinions about when and where the United States should go to war. What follows is a survey of some of the positions taken by the magazine’s editors and columnists on a number of military interventions, stretching from World War I through this week’s Leon Wieseltier piece on Syria. (Note: This history is admittedly incomplete, with gaps where archives weren’t available online.)

WORLD WAR I
Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, founding editors, initially maintained an isolationist stance. But things got a bit wobbly after the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, which occurred six months after the publication of the magazine’s inaugural issue. The Germans, the editors declared, “should clearly understand that even though sacrifices are made to avoid war, the sinking of the Lusitania no less than the sinking of the Maine will be remembered. It is bound to make a grave difference in the subsequent relations between the two countries.”

Still, TNR resisted backing the invasion. Lippmann counseled neutrality, writing “the nation which wishes to count for peace must be prepared if necessary to count against its enemies.”

The magazine changed course in November 1916; per the Encyclopedia of American Journalism, Croly “began to advocate a more interventionist policy that led to the magazine’s eventual support of a Congressional war declaration in April 1917.” (Lippmann later joined the Wilson administration.)

WORLD WAR II
According to Merrill Peterson’s Coming of Age with The New Republic, the magazine’s regret for “riding Wilsonian ideals into Europe’s war in 1917” was the catalyst for its reversion to isolationism during World War II. “This nation has to be ready for allied disaster in Europe,” said the editors, who believed that the country’s attention belonged on the home front.

THE ICELAND OCCUPATION
In May 1940, British troops invaded Reykjavík, shortly after Germany occupied Denmark and blocked communications between Iceland and Denmark. A year later, Britain transferred responsibility to the United States. “The American occupation of Iceland,” proclaimed the editors, is “grand good news.”

VIETNAM WAR
In the very early years of the war, TNR published “pro-Diem articles” by Joseph Buttinger, a friend of the South Vietnamese president.

By 1962, the editors were calling on President Kennedy to “act decisively now to regroup non-Communist political forces[.]” The next year, they were concerned about the domino theory, warning that “[n]either the US nor its allies can take a military defeat on the Southeast Asian mainland” because to do so would jeopardize “the major prize in Asia, or perhaps the world: India.”

NICARAGUA
In 1985, the editors acknowledged that an invasion of Nicaragua was not “morally or politically justifiable.” But, they argued, “that does not relieve us of responsibilities to the democratic resistance movement that has formed in Nicaragua and among Nicaraguan refugees and exiles.”

THE GULF WAR
In 1987, TNR ran an article called “Back Iraq: It’s Time for a U.S. Tilt” by Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie, which argued that the US ought to provide Iraq with weapons. (Mylroie, as Peter Bergen would put it years later, “believes that Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself.”)

Four years later, the magazine felt less sanguine about Iraq and ran a cover of Saddam-as-Hitler, mustache included. To buttress support for the Bush-led invasion, TNR published “[a] comprehensive case for the use of force” by Congressman Stephen Solarz (D-NY), who had met with Saddam Hussein twice and did apparently not care for him.

HAITI
In 1994, TNR seemed ambivalent about the incursion into Haiti. “The best way to keep casualties to a minimum would have been to stay home in Fort Drum,” they allowed. However, “now that we’re in, we can’t leave without something more tangible to show for our efforts than a “safe and secure environment,” or even a zero American body count.”

AFGHANISTAN
Back in 2001, when the US first began bombing Afghanistan “with the morally spectacular assistance of Great Britain,” the editors felt it was “important for Americans to understand that, if these indeed are the war plans of the American government, Operation Enduring Freedom represents a great correction in the contemporary American understanding of warfare.”

“So enough about the pluralistic future of the Hindu Kush,” they wrote a week later. “We are destroying one of the world’s most primitive and tyrannical regimes, but we have perfectly just reasons of our own for doing so. This time we are not making the world safe for democracy, we are making the world safe for Americans.”

Shortly thereafter, the editors complained that “[t]here is something exceedingly strange about America’s war in Afghanistan. It appears to be a war that involves little in the way of real American combat.”

THE SECOND GULF WAR
Even before it was cool, TNR was prepped for an invasion of Iraq. Less than two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, while downtown Manhattan was still a smoking crater, the magazine ran a story by former CIA director R. James Woolsey. He advised: “Intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the [attacks] would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks … were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.”

But a year later, the editors groused about “the Bush administration’s unconvincing arguments about an Iraq-Al Qaeda tie”, noting sorrowfully that such allegations “only convince skeptics that this White House will offer any rationale for war.”

The week before, the magazine had mocked a speech given by Al Gore in opposition to the forthcoming war. The editors said “it sounded like a political broadside against a president who Gore no doubt feels occupies a post that he himself deserves. But bitterness is not a policy position.” So there!

LIBYA
How eager were the editors for engagement in Libya in March 20011? Here’s the headline the day after the US began military operations: “In Libya, Obama Finally Did the Right Thing.”

SUDAN
A few months later, in June 2011, the magazine turned its attention to Sudan. To force the government there to stop killing its citizens, the editors suggested “arming the South Sudan government with surface-to-air missiles … or leaning on China, a close ally of Sudanese leader Omar Bashir, to use its influence to stop the violence[.]”

SYRIA
Last August, the editors acknowledged that with Syria, unlike Libya, “a military intervention is not possible[.]” However, Obama and Secretary Clinton, they said, “should be relentless in speaking out on behalf of the protesters. And they should not send mixed signals about whether we think Assad should stay in power.”

But by February, the editors were now saying it was “time to act.” “Should the United States act on these options? It is not an easy question, but we think that the case for doing so is starting to look stronger than the case against.” Although “[t]o be clear, we do not want to see troops deployed to Syria.”

Their recommendation instead? “[T]hat the United States and its allies look for ways to help the rebels hold off Assad’s troops, by arming them or using some degree of airpower on their behalf, or both.”

In this week’s Washington Diarist column, Leon Wieseltier revealed, in addition to a strong antipathy to Rachel Maddow: “Trashing force may win you a lot of friends, but it is stupid. There is nothing ‘artificial’ about the primacy of defense because there is nothing artificial about threats and conflicts and atrocities. The American political system’s ‘disinclination’ to war must not be promoted into a disinclination to history. We are not the country we were in the eighteenth century, as every liberal insists about every other dimension of American policy. Anyway, this is what President Jefferson said in 1806: ‘Our duty is, therefore, to act upon things as they are, and to make a reasonable provision for whatever they may be.’”

And in the history of The New Republic the reasonable provision seems to almost always be: military might.

Elon Green writes supply-sider agitprop for ThinkProgress and Alternet.

Are you enjoying Blown Covers, the blog for the book of the same name, which presents awesome New Yorker-esque covers and art, hosted by the magazine’s art director, but not affiliated with the magazine? Apart from the confusion in mission, I certainly am. Here are 99 Easter cartoons.

by Awl Sponsors

Tap into the best coverage of SXSW 2012, presented by MasterCard PayPass by visiting here. A sample:

For his much-anticipated SXSW comedy performance tonight, the always imaginative Reggie Watts will be stripping the soundtrack away from Ridley Scott’s 1985 fantasy film Legend and re-dubbing in his own live music and off the wall improvisations.

Legend starred a then-23-year-old Tom Cruise as a leaf-wearing “doltish bumpkin” (to hear Watts tell it) and Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show as the demon Darkness. Watts will be providing his own dialogue in place of theirs and a snark-laced commentary on the onscreen action.

If you’re unfamiliar with Watts’ shtick, the comic improvises music and whimsical lyrics, beat-boxing and using a Sony Mini-Disc player to make loops and layer his vocalized sounds. Watts has a hilarious, inspired, and wholly original comedic mind and it’s no wonder why Conan O’Brien picked him to be the opening act of his national comedy tour. It’s impossible to predict what one of Watt’s sets will consist of, because many times he doesn’t even know himself until he gets out on stage.

Watts performed his Legend remix in San Franciso as part of his 4-day “Reggiedency” at the Sketch Fest last month and word of mouth is strong for the Austin show, but be warned: The show will be held in the relatively small Velveeta Room as part of the Comedy Central festivities. If you want to get in, get there very early.

Reggie Watts performs as a part of the SXSW Third Man Showcase March 16th at Esther’s Follies, 508 East 6th Street in Austin.