Salon.com > Oliver Broudy

Air head

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 11:00:00 +0000

My wife and I live in Manhattan. Her parents are from Texas. A few months ago, they offered to buy us an air conditioner. Who could have guessed the turmoil this generous offer would precipitate? Weeks went by and the weather grew warmer, and I kept finding reasons not to take the plunge. Eventually, my wife began asking what the hold-up was about.

I couldn't exactly say. Higher electrical bills, yes, along with a certain moral queasiness about harming the environment -- after all, your standard 12,000 Btu window unit, running eight hours a day from June through August, will kick out 1,889 pounds of CO2 -- and the absurdity of alleviating climate discomfort with a device that in the long-term dramatically contributes to it hardly bears pointing out. But the environmental argument, compelling as it is, wasn't the real reason for my hesitation. My qualms go much deeper than that.

Speedo freaks

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:00:00 +0000

Like many other men who grew up on the ocean, I used to suffer from a sort of Speedo-induced PTSD, dating from when I was 8 years old and a friend of my parents, a Dane, appeared one day in a Speedo on a Connecticut beach, hale and hairy, flapping his arms, his bulge shining like a car bumper. Even at that early age, I sensed that something about this picture was deeply wrong, and in the years that followed, I learned to avert my gaze whenever one of these smiling bulgemeisters appeared. But now, nearly 30 years later, I'm the one standing there, flapping my arms. Somehow, I've become one of them: the guy with the marble bag.

It's been a long journey, and getting here has entailed coming to terms not only with my own personal baggage, as it were, but also with the not insignificant cultural baggage that dogs the Speedo to this day. What's so terrible about a guy wearing a woman's bikini bottom? Well, beside the obvious point -- that the vast majority of men don't go to the gym every day -- there's the unspoken association of Speedos with a certain queasy strain of '70s male sexuality. Squint your eyes at any halfway fit Speedo wearer and behind him you'll see the shadow of a another, even less savory figure: the Chippendales male dancer. Chippendales premiered in Los Angeles in 1979, and within a few years daytime TV had firmly imprinted the icon of the male dancer in the popular imagination. With their oiled abs, white shirt cuffs, bow tie, and sleek briefs, the Chippendales embodied the final, unctuous exudation of the sexual revolution.

Sweet smell of snobbery

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Twice recently, I've attended dinner parties where "high-percentage" chocolate was served as a dessert. Or perhaps dessert is the wrong word; more like a post-prandial treat. Much ado was made of these bitter victuals, as if each cube were a dram of fine port, meant to be lingered over and praised. One host (who keeps her chocolate in a special "chocolate chest" above the refrigerator, which she only takes down for guests) subjected us to a short lecture on the provenance of the chocolate, and how she discovered it, before allowing us to take a single bite. Another enthusiast at the table told me, with the self-congratulatory air of a true connoisseur, that it's possible to detect up to 400 flavors in a single cocoa bean. To my uneducated tongue, the stuff tasted more like crayons than a high-end luxury item. Since when, I wondered, did chocolate become an acquired taste?

The practical ethicist

Mon, 08 May 2006 12:23:00 +0000

Peter Singer is a professional ethicist. Best known for his 1975 book "Animal Liberation" -- a canonical text of the animal rights movement and the inspiration for untold thousands to take up vegetarianism -- Singer, in the last quarter-plus century, has published a string of books on everything from test tube babies to the ethics of George W. Bush. Considered fearless by some, and dangerous by others, virtually all agree that he is among the most influential philosophers alive today.

Singer's ethics are strictly utilitarian. In his view, all actions are judged by the objective measure of suffering they cause; there's little place here for subjectivity. In his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," for instance, he argues against the injustice of some people living in comfort while others starve. We have a moral obligation, he says, to do all we can to alleviate the suffering of others up to that point where the suffering of our sacrifice is equal to the suffering of those we are trying to help. (Singer himself donates 20 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF.) When confronted with the question of whether it's justifiable to save the life of one's daughter at the expense of the lives of two strangers, Singer's response is even more matter of fact. The choice, he would say, is a foregone conclusion: Two lives are better than one.

America’s unlikely defender

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:07:00 +0000

In the United States, Bernard-Henri Lévy is best known for his book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl," investigating the 2002 murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter on assignment in Pakistan. In France, however, BHL (as he is called) is known more for himself: a flamboyant, courageous, infuriating, charismatic and highly unpredictable writer, who in his checkered career has also played the role of philosopher, filmmaker, diplomatic envoy, war reporter and political activist. He is a celebrity intellectual, a driven enemy of orthodoxy who is regularly compared to Camus and Malraux.

Besides his book on Daniel Pearl, Lévy has also written an in-depth study of Sartre, and a book on Africa's forgotten wars, ambitiously titled "War, Evil, and the End of History." His untranslated works number 30, and he has written countless articles, columns and essays. He is among the most recognized and outspoken public figures in France, appearing regularly as a commentator on French television programs, and clashing frequently with other public figures, as when he traded blows in the fall of 2003 with the Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who had accused Lévy (along with a handful of other French Jewish intellectuals) of "communitarian politics" and a pro-Israel bias, a charge that Lévy characterized as "anti-Semitic."

Smuggler’s blues

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 11:20:00 +0000

In 1982 Richard Stratton was convicted of operating a Continuing Criminal Enterprise under the kingpin statute of New York State. For over 10 years he had been running an international drug smuggling operation, bringing tons of marijuana and hashish into the United States and arranging for its distribution. How does one become an international drug smuggler? For Stratton it was a fluke, a chance encounter south of the border in 1964. But what kept Stratton coming back for more was the challenge, the adrenaline rush, and the belief that one day he could take his experiences and put them all into a book.

After his conviction, Stratton got his chance. His eight-year stint in prison afforded him plenty of time to write "Smack Goddess," a novel based on the life of notorious drug dealer Frin Mullin, which was published upon his release in 1990. Since then, Stratton has worked as a consultant for the TV show "Oz," co-written and produced the award-winning feature film "Slam," and the Emmy Award-winning "Thug Life in D.C.," and created the Showtime series "Street Time." His first job after prison was working for Barbara Kopple, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who hired him to write a treatment for a film about Mike Tyson. Kopple kept him on as a field producer once the project got underway. "I remember running around from phone booth to phone booth," Stratton says, "setting up interviews, coordinating camera crews, organizing transportation logistics, and thinking, I can do this; this isn't so different from running a smuggling operation."

He lost his mind

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 13:30:00 +0000

Jonathan Cott has suffered from depression since he was 17. It became worse as he got older, but it wasn't until the '80s, when Cott was in his 40s, that antidepressant medication became widely available. Throughout the '80s and '90s Cott tried at least 20 different drugs, and was eventually diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder.

This didn't stop him from pursuing a successful career as a writer. Cott is the author of 16 books of nonfiction, including a biography of a 19th century muckraker, a study of a woman convinced she led a previous life in ancient Egypt and an exploration of the mystical allure and superstition surrounding the number 13. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone since the magazine's inception, Cott is also an acclaimed music critic whose many contributions to the field include an interview with John Lennon four days before his murder.

This winning streak came to an end in 1998, when Cott's mother died. Her death set off a bout of depression from which Cott was unable to recover. "I had been truly seriously depressed a number of times in my life, but never to the extent of being 'clinically' depressed," Cott says. "I just didn't care anymore."

Are we doomed?

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 20:32:00 +0000

Most of what we read we already know. Very rarely does a book come along that changes our whole way of thinking -- not just the facts, but how the facts fit into the larger scheme of things, and what that scheme actually is. Such books do not make for easy reading. Working against the grain of accepted truth, they require a lot of grappling, but once finished the reader emerges permanently altered.

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was such a book. In it, Diamond asked why European and Asian civilizations tended to prevail over others -- why, for instance, Francisco Pizarro, with 168 men, triumphed over 80,000 Incan warriors in 1532. Because (we are accustomed to thinking) Pizarro was an exceedingly greedy, ruthless opportunist who took advantage of the Incas' naiveté. Which is certainly true. But it is also true that he was not the world's only greedy, ruthless opportunist. More important, Diamond suggested, were the guns, germs and steel -- as well as a host of other advantages -- that Pizarro brought with him from Europe.