A must read: Three months after installing a paywall for Newsday’s website, asks the Observer, “how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com? The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.”

by Turkey

1. The Holocaust

Turkey is a parliamentary republic in Eurasia. It really hates The Holocaust.

Democrats engulfed by giant metaphor.

“We don’t really know what his motivation was here. The intent’s not clear.”
-New Jersey State Police spokesman Sgt. Stephen Jones discusses the case of a 61-year-old man who brought a box with a toy horse’s head to the office of Senate President Steve Sweeney. The man is being held on $25,000 bail and a psychiatric evaluation is pending. [Via]

Brace yourself. The endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly fascinating phenomenon of people who you wouldn’t expect to rap actually rapping is back for another go. This one’s somehow even better and worse than previous iterations. Sigh. Here’s Der Spiegel:

The sound is a familiar one: driving beats, austere rhymes, forceful vocals supported by female backup singers. Standard hip hop, it would seem. And yet, something doesn’t seem quite right. The lyrics-some are Yiddish, others Hebrew, still others Italian. And then there’s that voice. It’s certainly too old to be coming from a hip hop artist, isn’t it?

Uh huh. 85-year-old Esther Bejarano, one of the last surviving members of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, has teamed up with the German rap group Microphone Mafia and made a hip-hop album, Per La Vita.The aim is to raise youth awareness of the dangers of fascism. I don’t know. It’s hard to knock folks when their hearts are in the right place. Harder still when one of them lost her parents and sister in the Holocaust, and only escaped herself during a death march to Ravensbrück in 1945. And at the very least, you’d hope the project might find its way to one of the worst-named groups ever to release an album in any genre, Baton Rouge rappers the Concentration Camp.

The group’s ill-considered name (y’know, they’re concentrating really hard on their lyrics) has always seemed especially sad because one of its members, Young Bleed (top-right on the cover), is really, really good. His 1998 solo album My Balls & My Word is one of the great underappreciated works of southern rap-the best thing, by a ways, ever to come out on Master P’s No Limit Records. Listen to the single, “Keep It Real.” (I know, I know. But we’ve already established name-choosing as a weakness, right?)

As for her rapping partners, Bejarano likes them, and plans to record another album with them soon. But there have been some creative differences. “They are very nice people,” she says. “But they are a bit chaotic. They jump around on the stage a lot. I told them maybe they should tone it down a bit.”

“In an opinion issued on Monday, a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals hexed a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game of Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin…. Prison officials said they banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist in gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.”

Cineaste Marisa Meltzer appraises the Bring It On pentalogy.

You know what? I actually enjoyed this. But being both massively hirsute and encumbered with an enormous proboscis I already trim my nose hair with a scythe, so it didn’t really help me any. Though I do need to find me a barber shop that serves liquor.

I’ve been complaining to anyone who’ll listen that our Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is doing herself absolutely no favors in preparation for a Harold Ford incursion on “her” Senate seat, despite the recent noise that she is “hitting back” and the “gloves are off” etc. As ludicrous as Ford seems to many of us, and wow is he, yes-still he’s something of a threat, even though she is loaded for the campaign. He could actually become a halfway serious contender! Here are two things in two days that are not helping!

• This article yesterday on Senator Skinnybrand, all about how she is like, oh my God, slimming down, you know? After, like, the birth of her son? She’s, like, dieting and exercising! Okay, so now that she has locked up the vain 32-year-old non-voting lady vote, what’s next?

• How about… exchanging snippy tweets with Harold Ford? Really? (Ford had said that Gillibrand and Charles Schumer needed to “understand that you’re not elected to the United States Senate to be a parakeet or to take instructions from the Democratic leadership.” Which, actually, is not a very good characterization of Schumer!)

Man. Her 1802 Twitter followers are just going to be, like, super-miffed with Ford over this outrageous “parakeet” comment. That actually wasn’t name-calling! It was actually a characterization of her behavior. That’s how messages get communicated-and stick. Some real ground-breaking adventures in campaigning and press management here, right?

Roger Hodge, whose rise from the state of Texas to Harper’s intern to, in 2006, the magazine’s editor in chief was even heralded in a New York Times profile, is departing. Hodge generally held steady, and was present for a significant and extremely forward-thinking web overhaul, despite some early troubles in his tenure. Ellen Rosenbush-the managing editor since 1989, five years before Hodge was an intern-has been named the acting editor.