[Photos by AL IN PHILADELPHIA]
BY JEFF DEENEY So late last week the flash mob story broke national, and the middle class is freaking out about poor black teens using new technologies to organize riots that threaten white business districts, even though now it seems there was never a flash mob to begin with.  You’ve heard all kinds of commentary from a thousand white journalists who have never spoken to black teenagers in the neighborhoods except maybe when taking statements in court for a story, and seen bloggers who are equally distanced from urban poverty jumping in front of cameras to play expert I guess because they have an Internet connection.  You’re probably sick of reading about the flash mobs by now, and I understand that this commentary is late in coming.  But the difference between what you’re about to read and what you’ve been reading is that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to how new technologies have taken hold in the neighborhoods I’ve spent a lot of time working in over the last few years.

In the spring of 2007 I stood in the living room of a run down row house on D Street, one of the roughest streets in North Philly’s Badlands, and watched one of my young clients obsessively updating his Myspace page.  His family was so poor they didn’t even have much furniture and they were always behind on rent but the boy had hustled up enough money to get a computer that he connected to a $10 per month Internet connection, a special deal for poor families offered by Verizon.

“He’s always on that damn computer,” his mother croaked from where she sat on their ragged couch watching daytime talk shows.  “It broke down last week and he stole a shopping cart from the super market and pushed it all the way across town to get it fixed, he needs it that bad.  He’s missing school, up all night on the Internet, but there ain’t nothing I can do about it.”

Honestly, she wasn’t trying very hard to do much about it.  Drug addicted and mentally ill, she had provided little guidance for the boy, or her two other kids.  I guess she was doing the best she could; I’m sure many would disagree with that, though.

Later that same year I sat having lunch with another young client at the McDonalds on 2^nd and Lehigh in the same Badlands neighborhood.  A quiet, sullen kid, he sat mostly not speaking, staring at a Jay-Z video playing on his iPod.

“Who put that on there for you,” I asked.  I knew he was stone-cold illiterate, a high school drop out who had already done juvenile time on a gun charge.  There was no way he knew how to operate a computer well enough to load the video himself.

“For five dollars a week my cousin makes me a mix,” he said.

That’s a great hustle, I thought.  His young cousin probably made good money keeping his less computer-savvy friends up on hot new rap videos.  He was probably one of the few kids in the neighborhood who knew how to use the technology.

I’ve done social work in Philadelphia public schools; I worked in Bartram High, in the same violent Southwest Philly neighborhood where the papers reported about 11 year old kids playing a violent game called “Catch and Wreck” that involves brutally beating people who appear to be homeless.  Bartram High, a crumbling and decrepit facility, had a “computer lab” with six aged Dell laptops for almost 2000 kids to use.  Actually, only about half of those kids showed up on any given day, but still.

Over time I heard about other similar black market enterprises run by early adopters in the ghetto; a young kid who knows how to use torrents and Photoshop churns out pro-quality DVD bootlegs and becomes sought out by the whole neighborhood because his boots aren’t that shaky cam shit shot in the theater that everyone’s used to.

By summer of 2008 social networking sites like Myspace and Blackplanet became not just places to chat with the neighborhood girls but places to gather to celebrate neighborhood affiliations.  Students in the public schools bragged back and forth, beefing with the kids across town about which school is tops.  Corner kids started discussion forums dedicated to singing the praises of their corner drug crews whose teenage members proudly posted pictures of themselves on their pages pointing handguns at the camera, flashing fat stacks of rubber banded bills and piles of bagged up drugs.

One particularly wild crew, the Erie Avenue Mob out of North Philly’s Simon Gratz High School, had their own custom made logo – the city skyline with two Uzis crossed under it like an “X” – and a group inviting other kids in their school to “Join the Mob.”  The School District denied that corner drug crews were using social networking sites to recruit in the schools, stating they were blocked on the school’s networks.

But it was clear that nonetheless more kids were getting online outside of school and the power of the web was bringing together more kids with dysfunctional backgrounds in poor, urban neighborhoods than ever before.  Sometimes the results were positive and constructive, sometimes they weren’t.

By 2009 the new must have status symbol was no longer an iPod packed with hot video mixes.  The new must have item, like Air Jordans or a leather jacket once upon a time, is the smartphone.   Now in the neighborhoods it’s all about the IPhone, the Blackberry, the Droid.  That’s how the kids in class know you’re gettin’ money:  you got a flashy new phone loaded with a Twitter app and monthly data plan.  Everyone you know knows where you’re at and what you’re up to anywhere you’re at.  It’s an odd status symbol in a lot of ways; to whites in the corporate world the Blackberry is often seen as a sort of albatross that tethers you eternally to the office and many resent this new superconnectivity that can keep them working around the clock.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that when white people from healthy, nurturing families who have enjoyed the benefit of all the functional social institutions that come with privilege organize for a flash mob it’s an impromptu pillow fight and when newly networked black teens raised in dysfunctional families, deprivation and failing social institutions plan a flash mob it results in a crowd of angry boys beating on car hoods and chanting “burn the city.”  I think this stark difference highlights a lot about our intensely unequal society.

But was there even a flash mob?  When the story first broke I spent hours scouring Twitter and Facebook looking for evidence of a trail I could track back to those calling for a flash mob, and couldn’t find it.  I was able to find exactly on Twitter feed whose user mentioned getting texts about going to South Street, which, on the first warm Saturday night of the year, most kids would have done anyway.  Now Gawker has reported that the flash mob was nothing more than performances by couple dance troupes that got out of control.  The fact that the police department was calling it a flash mob organized on social networking sites should have been taken with a grain of salt because anyone who’s worked with the department knows that your average Philly cop is CAPS LOCK GUY who still has an AOL account, isn’t exactly up on new trends online, and might not be the most reliable source for this kind of information.

Days after the South Street flash mob, alerts went out from UPenn warning of another flash mob to form on 40^th Street. The flash mob turned out to be a couple hundred white journalists with notepads and video cameras hoping for a mob of black teens to show up and act all ignorant.

But, not surprisingly, the Philly papers ran with the “flash mob” story for more than a week despite lack of evidence that there was a trend at work because it got them link arounds and page views despite the fact that the whole thing smelled like bullshit from the beginning.  The newspaper’s job is to critically analyze information from law enforcement sources, not parrot it because it’s sexy and results in page view spikes, but, hey, I understand they’re in a tough spot right now when it comes to money.

So there you have it, a brief history of how we got to where we are today with respect to poor kids and how they use the Internet, and how it may or may not have lead to the Great Flash Mob Scare of 2010.  Let’s hope for the sake of white people in suburbs everywhere that poor kids don’t continue to use new technologies to organize gatherings outside their own neighborhoods.  And let’s also hope that if they do, at least they act real crazy so that newspaper reporters can continue to have more material for their stories about the disturbing new “flash mob” trend that is sweeping the city.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeff Deeney is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on The Daily Beast, PW, City Paper and the Inquirer. He focuses on issues of urban poverty and drug culture. He is currently working on a book about life in the crossfire of poverty, drugs, guns, and the bureaucracies designed to remedy them, all of which informed his experiences as a social worker in some of the city’s most dire and depleted neighborhoods.

MOTHER JONES: There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey “unconstitutional” orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government. Pray (who asked me to use his middle name rather than his first) and five fellow soldiers based at Fort Drum take this directive very seriously. In the belief that the government is already turning on its citizens, they are recruiting military buddies, stashing weapons, running drills, and outlining a plan of action.

For years, they say, police and military have trained side by side in local anti-terrorism exercises around the nation. In September 2008, the Army began training the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team to provide humanitarian aid following a domestic disaster or terror attack—and to help with crowd control and civil unrest if need be. (The ACLU has expressed concern about this deployment.) And some of Pray’s comrades were guinea pigs for military-grade sonic weapons, only to see them used by Pittsburgh police against protesters last fall. Most of the men’s gripes revolve around policies that began under President Bush but didn’t scare them so much at the time. “Too many conservatives relied on Bush’s character and didn’t pay attention,” founder Rhodes told me. “Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists. But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, ‘I think you are a threat to the nation?’” MORE

THE GUARDIAN: The Southern Poverty Law Centre identified Michigan as one of the states with the highest number of rightwing militias and extremist “patriot” groups. The number of such organisations rose by nearly 250% to more than 500 last year. The centre said police officers were a favoured target of extreme rightwing groups, with six murdered by militias since Obama became president. MORE

ALTERNET: In her bestselling End of America, Naomi Wolf outlines the 10 warning signs that America is headed toward a fascist takeover. Using historical precedents, she explains how our government is mimicking those of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin through practices like surveillance of ordinary citizens, restricting the press, developing paramilitary forces and arbitrarily detaining people. The book was lauded by liberals under Bush: the Independent Publishers gave it the Freedom Fighter Award; the Nation named it the best political book of 2007. Now, under President Obama, Wolf’s book is providing ammunition for the Tea Partiers, Patriots, Ron Paul supporters and Oath Keepers, who also warn of impending tyrannical government. Even when the book first came out pre-Obama, Alex Jones, Michael Savage and Fox News invited her on their shows, and agreed with her. It’s not just her message. She speaks their language, referring to the Founding Fathers and American Revolution as models, admitting to a profound sense of fear, warning of tyranny, fascism, Nazism and martial law. When Glenn Beck warns of these things we laugh. When Wolf draws those same connections, we listen. How can both sides be speaking the same language, yet see things so differently? Or are we just not listening to each other? I telephoned Wolf to ask her what it means when your book ends up bolstering policies you oppose. MORE

WARNING: This is very fucking funny, so only watch if you like to laugh. If you don’t like to laugh and you watch this, you may be very disappointed.

FLICKR: Broad Street Station (demolished) at Broad & Market Streets was the primary passenger terminal for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1881 to the 1950s. Directly west of City Hall, the office towers of Penn Center now occupy the site. Originally designed by Wilson Brothers & Company in 1881, Broad Street Station was dramatically expanded by renowned Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, 1892-93. In 1894, the PRR relocated its headquarters from Fourth Street to the office building above the station, where they remained until moving to the Suburban Station Building in the 1930s. It was finally demolished in 1953, a year after all train service to it had ceased. Broad Street Station dominated the center of the city. Trains would enter and exit the station two stories above street level on a viaduct known as the “Chinese Wall” and run west to cross the Schuylkill River. The access tracks thus bisected the western half of Center City Philadelphia into north and south. Fifteenth Street ran beneath the station’s lobby, and all the numbered streets up to 24th ran beneath the viaduct. John F. Kennedy Boulevard traces a similar path today. MORE

RELATED: Noted historian and architect Robert M. Skaler will present a lecture and a series of images illustrating the development of North Broad Street in the 19th century. While prosperous, North Broad Street was respectable but never really fashionable, as a “north” address did not have the cache of one south of Market Street to Philadelphia’s traditional elite class ensconced around Rittenhouse Square. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of social standing, residents of North Broad Street built their houses and churches grander than many in Center City preferring the clean “Uptown” air to that of the old Quaker City with its cramped hurley-burley. In addition, it is the home of Temple University and the Wagner Free Institute of Science. North Broad Street was also the center of social life of upper class German Jews who built four major synagogues, and the impressive Mercantile Club on Broad below Jefferson Street.  Robert M. Skaler is a forensic architect and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture. He is a Past President of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Victorian Society, board member of the Old York Road Historical Society member of the Union League of Philadelphia, and is an adviser to several Historic Societies. His books entitled West Philadelphia, University City to 52nd Street, Philadelphia’s Broad Street, South & North, and Society Hill & Old City, and Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square with co-author Tom Keels, are pictorial histories of Philadelphia. Following his lecture Mr. Skaler will sign copies of his book.

A History of North Broad Street: A Lecture by Robert Morris Skaler
Wednesday, March 31, 5 pm
Wagner Free Institute of Science
1700 West Montgomery Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19121
Free and open to the public

[Artwork by ZOLTRON]

FRESH AIR: Director Wes Anderson has worked on many movies — The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore among them — but Fantastic Mr. Fox is his first animated film. The movie, released on DVD this week, uses miniature animal puppets and miniature sets, animated through stop-motion photography to create a visually amazing world. MORE

DAN BUSKIRK: One hates to agree with such braggadocios bluster but yes, that Mr. Fox is quite fantastic.  Director Wes Anderson (known for creating painstakingly mounted neurotic whimsy like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited) takes an unexpected artistic left turn into perhaps his most satisfying film to date.  One thing even Anderson’s critics concede is that he has a knack for quaintly-detailed set design, so setting him loose in the hand-crafted world of old-fashioned figure animation is truly a match made in Heaven. MORE

With your life coach, A.P. Ticker.

Richmond Street at Shirra Drive  12:18 PM by JEFF FUSCO

NEW YORK TIMES: Nine members of a Michigan-based Christian militia group have been indicted on sedition and weapons charges in connection with an alleged plot to murder law enforcement officers in hopes of setting off an anti-government uprising. In court filings unsealed Monday, the Justice Department accused the nine people of planning to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer, then plant improvised explosive devices of a type used by insurgents in Iraq to attack the funeral procession. Eight of the defendants were arrested over the weekend in raids in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. A ninth remained at large, the Justice Department said. The indictments against them were returned last Tuesday. The defendants were identified as members of Hutaree, described by federal prosecutors as an anti-government extremist organization based in Lenawee County, Michigan, and which advocates violence against local, state and federal law enforcement. The group saw local and state police as “foot soldiers” for the federal government, which it viewed as its enemy, along with participants in what they deemed to be a “New World Order,” according to the indictment. MORE

RELATED: Hutaree

ALSO: A Philadelphia man has been arrested and charged with threatening to kill the Republican party whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, officials announced today. The FBI says Norman Leboon, 38, told investigators he was the “son of the god of Enoch” and that he had posted a video on the Internet threatening the lives of Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia and his family. An FBI affidavit makes no mention of an incident last Tuesday when a bullet smashed through a window at Cantor’s campaign office in Richmond ab out 1 a.m. Police have said their investigation indicated the bullet was a stray from a randomly fired handgun. According to the affidavit, Leboon allegedly said in the video: “Remember Eric . . . our judgment time, the final Yom Kippur has been given. You are a liar, you’re a Lucifer, you’re a pig, a greedy [expletive] pig. You’re an abomination. You receive my bullets in your office. Remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer’s abominations.” MORE

RELATED: Norman Leboon’s Videos

Mosco subway this morning  via TWITTER

BBC: At least 35 people have been killed after two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on Moscow Metro trains in the morning rush hour, officials say. Twenty-three died in the first blast at 0756 (0356 GMT) as a train stood at the central Lubyanka station, beneath the offices of the FSB intelligence agency. About 40 minutes later, a second explosion ripped through a train at Park Kultury, leaving another 12 dead. No-one has said they carried out the worst attack in the capital since 2004. But the BBC’s Richard Galpin in the Russian capital says past suicide bombings there have been blamed on Islamist rebels fighting for independence in the troubled North Caucasus region of Chechnya. In February, Chechen rebel president Doku Umarov warned that “the zone of military operations will be extended to the territory of Russia… the war is coming to their cities”. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: The two explosions spread panic throughout the capital as people searched for missing relatives and friends, and the authorities tried to determine whether more attacks were planned. The subway system, known as the Metro, is one of the world’s most extensive and well-managed, and it serves as a vital artery for Moscow’s commuters, carrying as many as 10 million people a day. “The terrorist acts were carried out by two female terrorist bombers,” said Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov. “They happened at a time when there would be the maximum number of victims.” Photos taken after the attacks showed scenes of devastation, with bodies strewn across subway cars and station platforms. MORE

THE TELEGRAPH: Islamist rebels seeking to establish an Islamic caliphate on Russia’s southern tip have largely confined their attacks to the North Caucasus area they want to control in recent years. But a bombing of a passenger train between Moscow and St. Petersburg last November that left dozens dead suggested they may be preparing to widen their campaign to Russia’s big cities. Russian security forces claim to have killed a number of high profile militants in recent months including one of the movement’s principal ideologues and strategists. Russian politicians said at the time that the rebels were likely to strike back to show they are still a force with which to be reckoned. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: In October 2002, 42 Chechen militants seized hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. Nineteen of the hostage-takers were women, marking the first time women had participated in a mission of this type on this scale. However, Chechen women have been carrying out suicide and other attacks since at least 2000.

September 1-3, 2004: More than 30 Chechen terrorists seize more than 1,000 hostages at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. According to reports, two to four of the terrorists were women.

August 31, 2004: Roza Nagayeva , the sister of Amanat Nagayeva (see above), blows herself up outside a Moscow metro station, killing 10.

vvAugust 24, 2004: Two Chechen women, Amanat Nagayeva and Satisita Dzhbirkhanova, detonate explosives on two Russian commercial airliners nearly simultaneously, killing a total of 90 people.

February 6, 2004: An unidentified woman kills more than 40 people in a suicide bomb attack in the Moscow metro.

vvDecember 9, 2003: An unidentified woman blows herself and six others near a Moscow hotel.

December 5, 2003: Four suicide bombers — reportedly three women and a man — blow up a commuter train in southern Russia, killing at least 44 people.

July 27, 2003: An unidentified woman blows herself and a female civilian up at a security checkpoint in Grozny.

July 10, 2003: Zarema Muzhikhoyeva is detained while attempting to explode a bomb near a downtown Moscow hotel. A police sapper is later killed trying to disable the bomb.

July 5, 2003: Two female suicide bombers — Zulikhan Elikhadzhiyeva and Maryam Sharipova — kill 14 at Moscow rock concert.

June 5, 2003: An unidentified female suicide bomber blows up a bus in Mozdok, North Ossetia, killing at least 18.

May 14, 2003: One or two female suicide bombers kill at least 16 at the Chechen town of Iliskhan-Yurt. Russian authorities believe the attack was an attempt to assassinate pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov.

May 12, 2003: Two or three suicide bombers explode a truck at a government complex in Znamenskoye, Chechnya, killing at least 60 people. According to some reports, the truck was driven by two unidentified women.

October 23-26, 2002: Nineteen of the 41 militants who seized hostages at a Moscow theater were women. All the terrorists died when special forces stormed the building.

November 29, 2001: Elza Gazuyeva detonates a bomb, killing herself and a Russian military officer in Urus-Martan. Gazuyeva blamed the officer for ordering the killing of her husband.

June 7, 2000: In the Chechen town of Alkhan-Yurt, Khava Barayeva — a woman related to two Chechen field commanders — detonates a truck bomb. The Russian military says two soldiers were killed.

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

BY RITA BOOKE Message boards and email lists devoted to David Foster Wallace, who became a literary it-boy with the publication of “Infinite Jest” in 1996, fell silent with his suicide in 2008 after an paralyzing bout of depression. Recent news has brought a bright spot to fans of the postmodern master: the University of Texas at Austin has acquired the entire DFW archive. Handwritten drafts of IJ, childhood poems, his personal book collection, it’s all there for us to (soon) see. For DFW’s devoted, the archive promises a thrilling look inside our hero’s beautiful mind, but it’s also a gut-punching reminder that this is all we’re ever going to get from Our Man. (Yes, we actually call him that.) For now, the Dave faithful will have to keep squinting at the tiny pdfs on UT’s website until the collection opens to the public this fall. Materials from the posthumous The Pale King will be added to the archive after the book’s release in April 2011.

Even for obsessive fanboys and gushy nerdgirls, ahem, who have read every word he put to paper and know ridiculous trivia like what brand of tobacco he dipped (Skoal) and his curious taste in magazines (Cosmo), there’s still plenty of pulse-quickening new stuff here that’s well worth the eye strain. The sneak peeks into DFW World, not surprisingly, are parts silly and sad, flip and sincere, snarky and empathetic. There’s a large dog-eared dictionary with words circled, one for each letter. Try these on for size: Abulia. Benthos. Cete. Uxorious. Valgus. Witenagemot. (Dave never got to X, Y and Z.) Dorky, funny and so totally ADD (or maybe OCD), his collection of weird words kind of sounds like how he wrote. DFW’s personal library is also part of the archive, including heavily marked up copies of books by his friend and idol Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and  — wait for it –  Mary Higgins Clark. “Where are the Children”? WTF, Dave? The scholars are stumped on that one, which is pretty awesome.

Scrutinizing the scribbles inside his paperback copy of Rabbit, Run — phrases like “sad smelling” and an all caps “RABBIT MOURNS HIMSELF” –  hint at DFW’s irritation that he’d revisit in a 1997 piece for The New York Observer on John Updike, a “literary phallocrat.” Think a book review can’t be laugh-out-loud hilarious? Read that one. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s cool to see from the scribbles inside DeLillo’s 1976 novel “Ratner’s Star” that it provided direct inspiration for themes and characters that would wind up in Infinite Jest. Beyond the inside-baseball literature dweebery, the most touching piece of the archive that we’ve been shown so far is the sticky notes he used for an IJ revision that look like they came from the Hallmark store’s “office humor” collection. Purple post-its with lame wacky cartoon characters saying “I told you this would happen!!” marking the pages of the 20th century’s greatest novel. Brilliant and banal. Why is that so damned heartbreaking? As amazing as this archive is, looking at it makes his death real in a way it wasn’t before. Now the most we can do is pore through his papers, looking for secret clues in his notations and chicken scratch and doodles, hidden pieces of his a-ha moments and hair-pullingly obsessive meta-ruminations. We’ve got to extract whatever undiscovered gold exists in this mine, because that’s it. No more books, no more nothing. The end.

RELATED: By now you may have heard. David Foster Wallace—author of the splendidly outrageous 3-pound mega-novel Infinite Jest, MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, the most influential and innovative fiction stylist of his generation, the smartest, funniest, strangest, most endearing and (let’s just say it) the greatest writer under 50 in America—killed himself at his Claremont home on Sept. 12 [2008]. He hung himself. By mid-morning on Sunday the 13th, thousands of his readers were placing disbelieving phone calls, sending disconsolate e-mails (I got one whose subject line said simply, “fuck”), and posting grieving Web site comments to their disbelieving, disconsolate and grieving friends and fellow readers. A recent New York Times piece compared the shock that Wallace’s suicide created among the literary community to how Kurt Cobain’s suicide affected the rock world, and there’s something to that. For many of us—even for those like me who didn’t even know him (I met him once, for five minutes)—his death felt like a fierce personal blow, close to home, family-intimate, and the weeks since have been like stepping through a Kubler-Ross minefield of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, but not yet—not even close—acceptance. I find myself rereading the essays collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again with the usual sloppy grin on my face—some of them can make you laugh so hard they have literally given my fiancee asthma attacks—only to realize that much of the pleasure his writing has always given me comes from the comforting fact that, until now, there’s always stood a human being somewhere on the other side of that ingenious prose, that someone as sweet, knowing, beguilingly hilarious and drop-dead brilliant as Dave Wallace was somewhere, reliably, on the planet. Now there’s not, and I keep getting blindsided by that knowledge. MORE

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Because certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die hard, I’ll give you a little bio. I was raised in a solid, loving, two-parent family. None of my close relatives have substance problems. I have never been in jail or arrested–I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. In 1989, I already had a BA and one graduate degree and was in Boston to get another. And I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict. I had been in detoxes and rehabs; I had been in locked wards in psych facilities; I had had at least one serious suicide attempt, a course of ECT, and so on. The diagnosis of my family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented but had “emotional problems.” I alone knew how deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs, which I’d been using heavily since age fifteen. Every single one of my mental-health crises had followed a period of heavy bingeing on marijuana, tranquilizers, and alcohol. I had first vowed to quit at age nineteen; the longest I’d ever gone without any sort of substance was three months. I was convinced that this was because I was weak, or because I really did have intractable mental problems which only drugs and alcohol gave me any relief from. I therefore spent most of the 1980s on the horns of a dilemma that many addicts and alcoholics understand very well. On the one hand, I knew that drugs and alcohol controlled me, ran my life, and were killing me. On the other, I loved them–I mean really loved them, as in the sort of love where you’ll do anything, tell yourself any sort of lie to keep from having to let the beloved go. For most of the late 80s, my method for “quitting” drugs was to switch for a period from just drugs to just alcohol. Then I’d switch back to drugs in order to “quit” drinking. The idea of months or* *years without any chemicals at all was unimaginable. This was my basic situation. I both wanted help and didn’t. And I made it hard for anyone to help me: I could go to a psychiatrist one day in tears and desperation and then two days later be fencing with her over the fine points of Jungian theory; I could argue with drug counselors over the difference between a crass pragmatic lie and an “aesthetic” lie told for its beauty alone; I could flummox 12-Step sponsors over certain obvious paradoxes inherent in the concept of denial. And so forth. MORE

RELATED: Celebrating The Life And Work Of David Foster Wallace

PREVIOUSLY: Let’s All Make Love In Jest

PREVIOUSLY: David Foster Wallace Kills Self

BY TIFFANY YOON The phrase ‘Deliberative Democracy’ implies that a democracy cannot function without its citizens having the information necessary to make daily life-changing decisions.  These opportunities for the general public are found in electing representatives on every level of government and keeping those officials accountable.  On Thursday, March 25th, Temple University Verizon Chair in Telecommunications, Dr. Jarice Hanson, along with doctoral student in Mass Media and Communications, Alina Hogea, held an idea-sharing session entitled Deliberative Democracy: The Internet and Civic Engagement, to open the discussion on how to keep democracy alive and well and how technology is changing the playing field for everyone.

Gitlin was joined by panelists Michael X Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Sina Odugbemi, program head of the Communication for Governance & Accountability Program at the World Bank and James MacMillan, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and former senior photographer and first video journalist at the Philadelphia Daily News.  As the Internet has evolved into the primary news and information source for the general public, concerns over how public and national opinion will and can be formed have grown, because while more sources of information are available, the once unifying glue of mass media is being lost. Professor Todd Gitlin of Columbia University, the event’s keynote speaker, took the audience through a history of information-sharing beginning in the 19th century to illustrate how old media had helped formulate national public opinion.  Citizens learned a great deal about their world and the world around them through what Gitlin states as, “the practice of incidental learning.”  When reading newspapers, people would read the information they were seeking, but there was also content available that they were not already looking for and there was a kind of “rubbing off of information.”

People were receiving information in a variety of different ways, but it was more manageable and therefore more unifying, because citizens were generally being exposed to both sides of the argument and were then free to formulate their own opinions.  In the age of the internet and thousands of cable television channels to choose from, people are picking and choosing what they want to hear and what they’d rather ignore and deem as “other.”  As Gitlin puts it, “If more information equals more democracy, then we should be far along by now.” Take the recent healthcare bill for example.  With all media outlets — the web, television, print or on the airwaves — competing for what Gitlin calls “a clamor for attention,” it is hard for media consumers not to feel overwhelmed with information. If a citizen feels one way about healthcare, they’re going to choose the news source that agrees with them, whether it is for or against it, conservative or liberal.  However, in order for a working democracy to continue to function, people must be aware of what they may not agree with.  Gitlin said it would be like being ushered into a room where democracy is taking place, whether you like it or not and coming face to face with exactly what you disagree with.  There must be a mixed pot of ideas available for everyone, otherwise the niches of media will become the isolated pockets of society.

New Media is not the enemy, however, because as James MacMillan stated, this is actually “the beginning of journalism” not the end.Technology is a double-edged sword in media, because it is giving more opportunities for outlets of information, but it is also isolating individuals within American society.  This same technology could be used to unify citizens as well, as the Internet has increased globalization and accessibility.  It is simply more about managing the Internet to its consumers and how producers of media must come up with new models to keep the conversation and “way of life” of democracy alive.

GREENBERG (2010. directed by Noah Baumbach, 107 minutes, U.S.)

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC

Greenberg is a very funny new character study about an improbable man.  Ben Stiller is ingeniously cast to bring to life Roger Greenberg, a man who seems to have found every experience in life so disappointing that his world has come to a halt.  He washes up rootless in his old hometown of L.A. after living in New York City for years.  While house-sitting for his brother’s family he reconnects with all the old friends he has alienated and starts a very unromantic romance with his brother’s young assistant Florence.  Florence  (played by Mumblecore Diva Greta Gerwig) is a sweet and insecure cafe folk singer when she’s not working for Roger’s brother.  She’s just out of college, is falling in and out of bed a little and feeling a bit rootless herself.

Roger is recovering from some sort of unspecified breakdown so he’s “trying to do nothing for awhile” and Greenberg the movie follows his lead, aimlessly bumming around with this malcontent as he offers witty and sour insights on modern life and modern L.A.  “All the adults here dress like kids here and all the kids dress like superheroes” is a typical comment and they keep coming as long as he has someone to whom he can kvetch.  When he doesn’t he writes snide screeds to businesses whose service he finds lacking.

Written by director Noah Baumbach with his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh (who makes a brief appearance as Roger’s ex-girlfriend), Greenberg is a rambling, well-observed character study that recalls the sort of social satires Hal (Shampoo) Ashby made in the 1970’s, where unlikely characters struggle to live up to society’s expectations.  Greenberg may have lame excuses for his many shortcomings (he can’t swim, he can’t drive and he backed out of a record deal against the wishes of his still-disgusted old bandmates) but the world he rails against certainly seems worthy of his disdain.

Yet as entertaining as the film is, I feel like Baumbach is stacking the cards to get us to embrace someone we should rightfully be repulsed by.  Roger’s sense of entitlement, superiority and cynicism could only be this perversely enjoyable when wrapped in the movie star charisma of Ben Stiller.  Stiller hasn’t shown his face in anything but mainstream comedy fodder since 2001’s Royal Tenenbaums and his performance here is a welcome reminder of how engaging he can be.  Stiller specializes in a certain slow burn agitation yet here the tension is somewhat submerged, his eyes glazed over from his regiment of prescription meds.  Much as Nicholas Cage did earlier this year in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant remake, Stiller shows us why he’s a box-office success, even with his everyman looks he is compulsively watchable.

Stiller’s way with a deadpan one-liner and cinematographer Harris Savides gorgeous work, reinforcing the idea of an isolated and unfriendly L.A., makes it surprisingly easy to live with this grump.  And Greta Gerwig’s naturalistic Annie Hall-like insecure love interest is so welcome on screen you can almost forgive Greenberg for being another film where the middle-aged lead easy scores a girlfriend a decade-and-a-half younger than himself.  A bitter brand of cynicism being sold in this film and one that would play out much less rewardingly in real life.  The real life Greenbergs are the death of any party.

RELATED: Greenberg is pretty much the fictional representation of the masculinity crisis that Susan Faludi outlined in her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Men like Greenberg, Faludi argued, were led to believe as boys that they were “going to be the master of the universe and all that was in it,” that they’d be astronauts conquering the final space frontier or, at the very least, that they would master a lifelong stable job and a healthy family. But by the ’90s, Greenberg types found themselves “masters of nothing.” The latest recession is only making it more so, as job security becomes a fantasy for many, and marriage rates plummet. And yet men are still tragically unable to retool. The image of the American woman has gone through several upheavals since the 1950s, but the masculine ideal seems fixed in cultural aspic: Think slick ad executive Don Draper in Mad Men and the WWII heroes in the Tom Hanks-produced HBO series The Pacific. So his confused, paralyzed counterpart is cropping up in ever-more variations on TV and in movies: the omega male. MORE