Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager: Out tomorrow. (An excerpt.)

Back in my day, we had to memorize a long list of hanky colors so we didn’t accidentally go home with someone who was only really into peeing on people. Now there’s an app for that and you kids have posters that explain the meanings of gay chest hair shapes. Has the world changed or have I changed, etc.?

This is ostensibly a story about a man who was attacked by a bear in Colorado, and if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy you can certainly appreciate it on that level. But what’s more fascinating to me is the way this reporter chose to dramatize the action. Pay attention at around the :40 mark. Is this some bizarre existential moment? Or is it a subtle confession? Are we dealing with a werebear? So many questions.

by Mark Bergen

It was an event in which egotistical agitators provoked the fragile, isolated state of Israel. Or it was a case of baldly shameless Israeli commandos attacking ambassadors of humanity. Or a little of both. Or, maybe, neither. It all depends on where you stand. The attempt of the Mavi Marmara ship to pass through the Gaza blockade ballooned an already intractable conflict, one that has been waging for years and years.

And for a couple hours last Thursday evening, motivated New Yorkers stood firmly on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue, entrenched on their respective sides.

Al-Awda New York, a grassroots group dedicated the incomprehensibly complicated notion of “Palestinian return,” invited a group of activists who were on the Mavi Marmara to speak. To tell the real story. More than a hundred arrived to the small strip of downtown Brooklyn that is sprinkled with Islamic stores. It was held inside the House of the Lords Church, a charismatic Pentecostal congregation, which the event organizer’s praised as a gracious, brave host.

Natasha Rivera did not agree. “They’re fake Christians,” she said of the church, standing on the opposite side of the street behind a small police barricade. A lithe brunette, Rivera came out to protest this “so-called church” and the people therein who “support terrorists and terrorism.” Rivera, she told me right off the bat, “is a Christian.” She heard about the event from Stand With Us, a fervently pro-Israel group. She could safely be called part of Christian Zionism, a multifarious movement of Evangelicals that offer unconditional support for the sole Jewish state. She held up a sign that accused Hamas of sending rockets from Mosques. A few dozen joined her, some wearing yarmulkes, and raising Israeli flags and placards that read: “Peace Activists Don’t Use Knives and Clubs.”

“[It’s] a con job long time in the making,” Dan Brooks said of the church’s event. A Jewish protester, Brooks claims to be one of the brains behind “We Con the World,” the snarky viral video that lambasted the world’s reproach of Israel after the flotilla. He sees it as his duty to “be on the scene at every radical event,” as he was last night. Brooks accused Hamas and their supporters of being needlessly inflexible. They offered “no compromise,” he said, and refuse to promote a two-state solution.

Brooks is an artist. And he sees his strongest role for his beloved nation as educating people about the country through his aptly named group, “Artists for Israel.” At earlier events, he noted, he and his cohorts set up “brainwashing stations,” dramatic reenactments to demonstrate that “they’re just brainwashing people” Who? I asked. “The Palestinian movement in general.”

Brooks’ counterpart inside the church was Iara Lee, a a soft-spoken, Brazilian-born documentarian who recorded footage aboard the Mavi Marmara. Her artistic mission, she told the audience, was to “show people can use creativity to resist war.” She showed her roughshod, cinema verite clips of the scene onboard the famed ship. Before Lee in the “so-called church,” came Kevin Overdon who railed against the “so-called impartial inquiry” on the flotilla raid Israel set in place. (He mentioned David Trimble, an Irishman assigned to the inquiry who, two month prior, had started a “Friends of Israel” group.) Overdon, a British activist, was a provocative speaker. “Their blood,” he said of the nine killed aboard the ship, “is now lapping on the shores of Gaza. But their blood has not shed in vain, because the tide has turned.” The blockade would be removed, Overdon promised. And the flotilla event was the catalyst for his movement’s eventual triumph.

Al-Awda had invited Ahmet Unsal, a former member of the Turkish Parliament who was on the ship, to speak. He is also a member of member of IHH, an international non-governmental organization based out of Turkey, otherwise exhaustively known as The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. Unsal, however, did not make the event. He was apparently restricted by the successful efforts of several NY politicians who teamed up with a high-profile Jewish organization to keep him out. They claimed the IHH is tied to Hamas. The State Department, however, did not validate the claim. But Unsal, the organizer’s said, was still unable to obtain a visa.

This did not go unnoticed inside.

One of the speakers prompted the audience “to stand up to the new McCarthyism,” a slight against the legislators who attempted to blacklist Unsal. Each local politico was called out by name to a chorus of boos. Quinn. Boo! Stringer. Boo! Nadler. Boo! Rangel. Boo! (David) Weprin. Boo! One woman in the back row of the balcony heaved a resonating “Shaaaaame!” “It’s no exaggeration,” the speaker asserted, “to say their hands are dripping with blood.”

But the harshest language was reserved for NY’s Democratic chieftain, Chuck Schumer. “When you look up ‘weasal’ in the dictionary,” the speaker said of our senior Senator, “his name is there.” Schumer recently drew attention for a speech at the Orthodox Union where he called for action to “strangle [Gaza] economically.”

As the speaker concluded, he introduced a man most definitely “not a politician,” but a revolutionary. City Councilman, former Blank Panther and recently declared gubernatorial candidate Charles Barron stepped to the pulpit, leading the crowd with cheers of “Free Palestine!” His speech quickly morphed into a campaign stump, where he blasted his party for its all white slate. He heralded a strange call-and-response to rub this point in. “Cuomo?” “White!” Both Barron and Ovenden framed their cause squarely in line with black liberation movements, drawing parallels with South African apartheid and dropping Steve Biko’s name. (At one point Ovenden summoned Malcolm X: “Perhaps he would say, ‘We didn’t land on Israel. Israeli landed on us.’”)

One city politician who was not mentioned was standing across the street. Dov Hikind, a Democratic Assemblyman who represents the swaths of Orthodox Jewish communities in Borough Park, called the flotilla deaths a “tragedy without question.” But the “people responsible,” he told me, “were the people from IHH.” He claimed that IHH had funded the ship, and “organized the violence; the confrontation with Israelis.” His position is more or less aligned with 85 U.S. Senators.

The most strikingly bizarre thing about the whole messy affair is where the two sides agreed. When I asked Hikind about the response in his district to the flotilla incident, he responded that “everyone was upset.” Naturally. But they were mainly peeved about the “one-sided coverage.” He cited CNN’s unfair blame of Israel in the immediate aftermath, as the facts where still trickling out. Inside the church, Lee prefaced her footage as images the Israeli government tried to block. They “didn’t want the world to know.” Likewise, Brooks saw his role as combating dangerous myths about Israel perpetrated in-where else?-the media.

Both sides’ outsized ire toward the media-an industry that we are told is increasingly dying, fractured, and decidedly not authoritative-seemed odd, given the actual issues at stake. But I can see how people in the city who care passionately about Israel-Palestine, or have loved ones one either side, might be overwhelmed by futility. The easiest option is probably to hurl insults at cable news.

And so I left with a bit of renewed gratitude that I don’t, in my daily life, have to deal with a right-wing Israeli government, or Hezbollah rockets, or a U.S. funded IDF, or a nuclear Iran. I only have to contend with Wolf Blitzer.

Mark Bergen has mixed feelings.

“The whole idea was to do this kind of ironic statement of lining the building with storefronts that would be reminiscent of independent businesses. It’s the story about the streets of New York as they once were.”
-Ron Pompei, creative director of the firm which designed the storefront for an Urban Outfitters scheduled to open on the Upper West Side this August, talks about the shop’s facade, will appear to show “a hat store, a hardware store, a neighborhood bar and a bodega.”

I happen to like all three of the components of this week’s Storychord (where, every issue, they group a photographer, a writer and a musician) and not just because the text is by Awl pal Miles Klee. (Um, that song is really good.)

Dean Winters is going to have to step it up in those new Allstate Insurance ads. Tommy Lee better get a new tattoo. Peter Olczak, of Port Murray, New Jersey is a better personification of “mayhem” than either one of those goody-goodies. Olczak, 59, was arrested three times in 24 hours this past weekend. Twice for disorderly conduct (which is usually just known as “conduct” in New Jersey) and once for criminal trespass. No insurance policy could save you from him.

Connoisseurs of the bear video will want to head immediately to the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is hosting raw footage of a grizzly bear and her cub charging a filmmaker. The filmmaker fired a shot into the air at precisely the right moment, scaring the bears off. (Naturally, this leads to an argument about handgun control in the comments section, because that it how everything in the Internet eventually ends.) The clip is definitely worth a click.

by Pearl Hawthorne

Okay, yes, I’m old. I don’t just like white wine-I like ice in my white wine. I collect cute cocktail napkins illustrated with flowers and farm implements. I only just discovered Lady Gaga. I really like BBC America. And I can genuinely list ‘travel’ as an ‘interest.’ I am, in other words, entering my later-30s.

I also like to write, and receive, thank you notes. No, not thank you emails-thank you notes. Those little folded cards or scraps of notebook paper that require stamps and the decrepit old machinations of the US Postal Service. And I am here to tell you: I am not alone. Other old people (like the ones who interview you for jobs) like thank you notes, too. In fact, they expect them. And when they don’t come, it can be a problem. For you. How? Keep reading.

While I appreciate personal thank you notes from family members for gifts, or friends for baby stuff (see, I’m old! My friends have babies!), or for wedding presents, etc., I’m really talking about the professionally-oriented thank you note here, the one you write after a boss of some kind, or really anyone more senior than you in your chosen profession, takes the time to interview you for a job that exists, or might potentially exist, or even just offers you some “career advice” or sits down with you for an “informational interview.” Especially in the latter situations-the one where there is no actual job, but could be somewhere in the future-the thank you note is crucial: you think all those other dopes making the rounds send thank you notes? No. If you do, you will be remembered.

Here’s a story: When I was much younger I was in charge of hiring interns at my then-job. A young woman came in and we talked; I had decided, ultimately, that she was over-qualified, and was not going to hire her for the unpaid position. She sent me a hand-written thank you note, and later, when I was hiring fact-checkers for actual money ($15/hr in the 90s-Eureka!) I remembered her, called her, and employed her steadily for a year.

Here’s another story: I was up for a job not so long ago at a magazine, and I sent thank you notes to everyone I met. I found out later I was the only one up for the job who did that, and that this had earned me a reputation for being “classy.” (So what happened? I pulled out of the running and decided to stay where I was….but still. I was the “classy” candidate!)

So now that I have you convinced that yes, you do have to write thank you notes, you might be craving instructions. What do I say? How do I write it? Etc. Here are the essentials to penning a job-oriented thank you note:

First, stationery: I recommend cards from Snow & Graham, or really anything letter pressed. However, your regular old Crane’s cards (they’re having a big sale right now) do just fine, too (and the company makes a number of selections with graphic designs and prints that aren’t too cute or loud).

If you want to go even higher-end, a graphic designer friend who also loves thank you notes recommends Fabriano Medioevalis.

Don’t pick anything that seems gender-specific (meaning: no pink, basically) or anything with a cartoon or doodle or ladybug on it.

Second, pen: Select a fine-point pen with black ink. Your penmanship is probably terrible after all those years of texting and computerizing. If you use a pen with a thick tip the ink will bleed too much and your note will look scary, like a monster wrote it. Print, unless your cursive is excellent.

Third, wording: You do not have to go fancy. If you called the person by their first name in emails, then use their first name. If not, stick with the formal: Mr. or Ms.

Do not use Mrs. or Miss. This is not elementary school.

For the body of the note, all you need to do is thank the person for taking time to meet with you. And if you want the job, if there is a job, say you are excited about the possibility of working with the aforementioned addressee. Do not use the note to re-promote yourself, or reiterate your accomplishments. That is obnoxious. We already talked to you. We have your resume.

Remember: Thank you notes are humble-they show you are taking the time to thank someone for taking their time out for you. This is what the email can’t accomplish: emails are a dime a million. We write them all day, we know they take five seconds (and the really good ones take about ten.) We also write thank you notes, so we know they take time
and focus and involve hand cramps. We know it’s a pain in the ass for you to write them, look up our addresses, track down a stamp that is actually of the correct value…. But that’s the entire point.

Thank you in email and thank you on paper means the same thing: Thank you. But the gesture of actually writing a note? Damn, it means you actually care.

Pearl Hawthorne is the pen name of an employed lady (hence the pen name) who frequently comes into contact with the young people.

We may not be stupid enough to have wiped ourselves out as a species (yet), but we’re certainly capable of doing it to others. Take the Louisiana pancake batfish, a species so “new” that it was only recently discovered by Louisiana State University ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty, who noted the fish’s freakish behavior and appearance.

“If you make an oval between your thumb and forefinger, they’re about that big. Their mouths and bulbous eyes are right in the front of their heads. You can’t even see their faces if you look from above,” Chakrabarty said.

Not only does it look odd; it also moves in mysterious ways. The Louisiana pancake batfish uses its foot-like fins, complete with an elbow, to push off the sea floor. Flapping its tail, it swiftly hops across the sand.

“They’re not like a flounder; they are much more mobile, more like a pancake with feet. They’re bizarre for what they look like and how they behave,” Chakrabarty said.

Unfortunately for the the Louisiana pancake batfish, it lives at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, which has been a bit oily of late. Chakrabarty worries that the spill will destroy the batfish’s ecosystem and cause its extinction. But, hey, we’ll probably find something else to replace it, right? And if it’s ugly-looking underwater creatures you want, there’s still the blobfish. I mean, until we destroy it through overfishing. Oh well. [Via]