rebootied

J. K. Rowling - By the Book - NYTimes.com

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read.

The United States can't win a war on terrorism, any more than it could win a war against armed robbery or tornadoes. What it can do is contain the threat to the nation caused by a specific group of terrorists: Islamist radicals.

To do so, it must strive to understand Al Qaeda and its ilk, and try to isolate them from communities which now give them tacit support. And it needs to have patience: Terrorist groups, even damaged ones, don't wither away quickly.

In brief, these are among the main conclusions of Louise Richardson's concise and illuminating new book What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. If you think the application of academic terrorism research to today's policy problems sounds interesting, this volume could be for you.

Not that Richardson is dispassionate. The Bush administration might even call her partisan. She considers both the overt declaration of war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq to be disasters in the context of fighting Osama bin Laden.

"Governments are invariably placed under enormous pressure to react forcibly and fast in the wake of a terrorist attack," she writes. "This response is not likely to be most conducive to long-term success against terrorists."

Richardson is one of the relative handful of experts who have been studying the history and practice of terrorism since the cold war.

Born in Ireland to Catholic parents, she experienced the seductive nature of terrorist groups at an early age. From the society she grew up in, she learned a remembered history of Ireland's long struggle with England that was full of heroes and villains, and was oversimplified to motivate the next generation. The facts didn't seem to matter so much.

After the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, in which 26 Irish protesters were shot by British troops in Derry, Northern Ireland, Richardson would have joined the IRA "in a heartbeat," she writes.

But she was only 14, and as she attended university and learned the real story behind some of her childhood myths, she became more interested in understanding terrorism than in joining it.

"The entire edifice of American security had failed to provide a shield," Faludi observes in the introduction to The Terror Dream, and in "the all the disparate nightmares of men and women after 9/11, what accompanied the sundering of our myth of indomitability was not just rage but shock at that revelation, and, with the shock, fear, ignominy, shame." The media spit out mantras like "Everything has changed" and spoke of "the death of irony," an environment in which a "cacophony of chanted verities induced a kind of cultural hypnosis."

The mystery, suggests Faludi, is that the United States, "the last remaining superpower, a nation attacked precisely because of its imperial preeminence, responded by fixating on its weakness and ineffectuality." To state what is a sweeping and nuanced argument by her loosely and reductively here, it is that after 9/11 we have been re-enacting a 1950s Western, John Wayne-style, "cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood" while trying to evade the terrifying knowledge of our own vulnerability. [emphasis mine, full text at Review-a-Day]

On Vikar's shaved head is tattooed the right and left lobes of his brain. One lobe is occupied by an extreme close-up of Elizabeth Taylor and the other by Montgomery Clift, their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other's arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.

This is the summer of 1969, two days after Vikar's 24th birthday. He's been in Los Angeles an hour, after a six-day bus trip from Philadelphia, and eats a French dip sandwich at Philippe's. A hippie nods at Vikar's head. "Dig it, man. My favorite movie."

"I believe it's a very good movie," Vikar agrees.

"Love that scene at the end. There at the Planetarium."

Vikar stands and in one motion brings the food tray up --

-- and then crashing down on the blasphemer across the table. He catches the napkin, floating like a parachute, in time to wipe his mouth. " 'A Place in the Sun,' George Stevens," Vikar says to the fallen man, pointing at his own head, "NOT 'Rebel Without a Cause,'" and strides out.

Amazon.com: Did you feel obligated to change it?

Gibson: In some cases. The Vancouver stuff is less one-on-one than the Manhattan stuff, for instance. The places, the restaurants are in different neighborhoods, things like that. The New York stuff I somehow stuck closer to the real thing. The New York stuff is more googleable.

Amazon.com: Yeah, everybody knows New York, every inch of it.

Gibson: You can google it at a higher resolution.

gameblather

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.