Jacques Leslie's Blog

• Obama's acceptance speech

  November 5, 2008

  • What struck me was his composure, his utter lack of gloat or exultation. In his refusal to revel in his victory, he seemed to ask us, “Why did you ever doubt that I would win?” His solemnity suggested what for politicians seems unimaginable: a lack of ego. It was as if he’d absorbed his victory and was already focused on shaping his agenda. No time to waste, even in celebration. And of ...
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• On Election Night, I Will Cry

  October 25, 2008

  • If Obama wins, I will cry. His candidacy has been an astonishment, as the possibility that a black man could win the presidency has grown to odds-on likelihood. While his victory would not mark the end of racism, it would at least confirm in the most dramatic of ways that bigotry can be overcome. Obama’s emergence is all the more stunning for occurring when so much else— the global ...
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• Acceleration

  September 29, 2008

  •      A few months ago the Presidential election seemed a self-contained narrative, an uncomplicated drama starring Barack and Hillary, and then Barack and John. Democrats feared that if their candidate threatened to win, the Republicans would pull an “October surprise,” and speculation centered on the bombing of Iran. But since then, time has accelerated, and the Presidential campaign no ...
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• The Death of David Foster Wallace

  September 14, 2008

  •     David Foster Wallace’s dismaying suicide sent me back to “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” his seminal, riotous essay on taking a Caribbean cruise. I had remembered, or thought I did, a sentence in the piece in which Wallace refers to his death as something exquisitely awful to contemplate and sad beyond imagining— or something to that effect.    I couldn’t find ...
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• John McCain's Immorality

  September 10, 2008

  •      One of the most appalling aspects of experiencing the current Presidential campaign has been watching John McCain’s step-by-step shedding of every last vestige of integrity. McCain once stood out among Republicans as a supporter of legislation to limit climate change and reasonable immigration laws and as a critic of both Bush and the party’s ultra-right Christian fundamentalist ...
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• "The Tipping Point": Bill McKibben's urgent global warming update

  June 9, 2008

  • "The Tipping Point," Bill McKibben's post on climate change, is concise, urgent, and entirely worth reading. It's at:http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2012By the way, the site where McKibben's story appears, called environment360, is an excellent compendium of environmental writing and reporting. It's run by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The home page ...
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• Needed: The Perpetual Election

  May 22, 2008

  •  Buck up, Americans!It’s true that Hillary Clinton refuses to drop out of the Democratic race, threatening to turn an interminable campaign into a more or less perpetual one, but this is good! Americans, after all, love competition, and elections are the best competitions of all. They’re nearly perfect television dramas, as compelling as The Sopranos, with just as many plot twists ...
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• "Environmental Pornography"

  March 1, 2008

  • The other day I ran into the term "environmental pornography," hurled in the general direction of my recent piece on the grim international environmental impacts of China's growth, "The Last Empire" (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/the-last-empire.html). The term apparently refers to stories which describe, sometimes in despairing terms, the international ...
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• Obam'a's biggest strength

  February 10, 2008

  • Barack Obama’s most significant strength, not being given sufficient attention so far, is that his campaign’s precedent-setting reliance on a huge number of small contributors means that he is less beholden to corporate interests and the wealthy than is Hillary Clinton. This means that as President, he would have at least the potential to stand up to corporate interests in a way that Hillary ...
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• Most bizarre news story of the week

  February 4, 2008

  • So Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has been rebuked by the State Department for having the temerity to sit next to Iran’s foreign minister at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Khalilzad apparently did not shake the Iranian official’s hand or even address any comments to him ...
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• The Campaign and the Environment

  February 1, 2008

  • Watching last night's Democratic debate between Sens. Obama and Clinton, I was stunned that not one question was asked about the environment. We face a burgeoning environmental crisis, one that threatens the well-being of every human on the planet, and yet most reporters (and probably by extension, most of the public) does not take it seriously as an "issue." (Assuming we get the ...
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• Why does anyone read blogs?

  January 29, 2008

  • So why does anyone read authors’ blogs, anyway? Writers spend hour after hour honing their published texts, searching for the exquisite word, the finely turned phrase, the well-coiled paragraph, and yet apparently a segment of the reading public chooses to read their blogs, their before-and-afterthoughts, which they throw down on the paper without regard, like children spilling paint. Maybe ...
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