Henry Jenkins interviews Jorn Ahrens, talking about comics and the city:

Are there specific ideas about the city which originate with comics or do you see comics as primarily replicating ideas which are in broader circulation?… What have comics added to our understanding of what it means to live in the city?

I see primarily the coincidence of the historical emergance of an environment of mass society, most clearly accentuated in modern urbanity with its implementation of the modern self, speed, a stone-born-nature, etc. and new types of mass media of which the comic is one. This coincidence, in my view, feeds a very particular and reflexive relation between the comic and the city. The film, too, is involved in this development. However, I see the comic being special here when its frozen sequentiality also corresponds with the frozen architecture of the sublime that the modern city contunally tries to realize…

Comics made the city readable. The city as social realm strongly refers to communication via images. Comics help turning these images into cultural narratives and aesthetics and to create outstanding icons of modern identity, landmarks of our self-understanding that are, by definition, not bound to specific cities or nations.

Anne Trubek looks at Superman’s original hometown (his first one on Earth, that is):

In 1933, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster dreamed up the comic strip hero with superpowers. Both boys were from immigrant Jewish families and lived down the street from each other in Glenville, then a booming, overwhelmingly Jewish, middle-class neighborhood, with kosher markets selling Yiddish newspapers on nearly every street corner. At the time, Cleveland was the fifth most populous American city, and a forward-thinking one at that, being the first to install public electricity and trolleys.

Siegel’s father first arrived in Cleveland as a sign painter, but he soon left that profession to open a haberdashery in a less prosperous part of town, only to die from a heart attack when robbers entered his store. According to Gerard Jones’ indispensible book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, the Siegel family was told that he had been shot in the chest. (Whether this incident was the inspiration for a bullet-proof superhero is unknown but seems plausible.)…

Judi Feniger, executive director of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, notes that Siegel and Shuster both exemplify the Cleveland immigrant story, as children of parents who may not have spoken English. They had a “working-class ethic that is particularly Cleveland, and particularly Glenville,” she says. In 2008, the museum hosted the exhibit “Zap! Bow! Bam!” about the creation by Jewish immigrants of Superman and other comic book heroes.

Yeah. I’m probably just going to blog about comic books and sports for a while.

In Greek mythology, the Amazons were matriarchal Scythian warriors who came out of the Caucasus and conquered parts of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, as well as islands in the Aegean. There are plenty of stories about them — they worshipped Ares and Artemis, they cut off their right breasts so they could be better archers, their queen Penthesilia fought for the Trojans against the Acheans and was killed by Achilles, Heracles had to get another queen’s (Hippolyta’s) girdle of power, and so forth.

Herodotus thought they were real, and you should never take anything the “Father of Lies” says lightly — but most Greek and Roman historians did too. Leonhard Schmitz (who wrote the encyclopedia entry linked above) guessed that the Amazons’ story came from the fact that the women of inland Turkey and Syria were total badasses, even in the early twentieth century, which didn’t fit the gender conceptions of their Greek, Persian, or Bedouin counterparts. Other people say it was the Minoans. The legend grew from there.

Let’s fast forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wonder Woman is an Amazon superhero, from Paradise Island, where the Amazons are still doing their thing. Later, they change the name of the island to Themysicyra, which was the Amazons’ capital in Asia Minor. Wonder Woman is no one to fuck with, “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury.” She’s Hellenic/mythological, but also idiosyncratic, foreign, a little bit Middle Eastern — but she still wears an American flag on her butt.

This is a long setup, so I’ll get to it. Check out Miss USA Rima Fakih:

Now here’s Wonder Woman, in an armored action figure inspired by Alex Ross’s graphic novel Kingdom Come:

The reasons to like Wonder Woman are more self-evident, so let me explain why I like Rima Fakih. She’s Lebanese-American, from Dearborn, MI (Robin & I are also from metro Detroit), and she’s probably the first Arab-American or Muslim ever to become Miss USA. She’s also fasting for Ramadan during the Miss Universe competition, but still wearing giant metal wings and standing under hot lights even though she can’t even have a drink of water. Now that’s Amazonian. If they ever do a live-action Wonder Woman, they should see if Miss Fakih can act.

Finally, I agree with io9 — for now, the DC Universe Online trailer will have to do:

Terrific Ask MetaFilter thread:

I found a scrap of paper with these terms on it, listed vertically. I don’t know when it was written, though it’s my writing and would certainly have been within the last 3-4 years. If you can draw any connections between these things, or interpret some of the odder ones (shapiro resp?), it would be wonderful.

The list:

godiva
silver lining
shapes yard
want faith
searches room
shapiro resp (possibly shapivo resp)
honeycombs
petula one
hermits
sons and loves (I’m reasonably sure it’s not Sons and Lovers)
ugly’s (that misplaced apostrophe is quite out of character)
torsin’/dorsin’ (one of the two)

Any guesses before you find out the answer?

Here’s my own first experiment with Storify. (See Robin’s here.) I tried to include a fair amount of the back-and-forth that went into it, but omitting some things and time/place-shifted others for readability.

On the treadmill today I was listening to last week’s All Songs Considered episode about odd musical pairings. Aretha Franklin and George Michael make an appearance, singing “I Knew You Were Waiting.” I was delighted to hear Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “The Face of Love,” I’ve been a longtime fan of that one. Frank Sinatra and Bono’s rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” got, um, under my skin, in the worst way.

But clearly the entire time I was stewing over what song I’d nominate. The answer that came to mind isn’t really a pairing, it’s just one song sampling another – Mariah Carey’s “The Roof,” based on Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. II.” It’s not even Mariah Carey’s first rap pairing – for her prior album, she’d memorably recruited Wu-Tang’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard (may he rest in peace) to ride shotgun on the delightful pop romp “Fantasy.” But I’d still go with it.

I consider the song itself quite an underrated confection. Mariah had clearly taken to heart critical murmurings that her inevitable ascent into whistle register during her songs was an annoying crutch, a circus trick. So for the album on which “The Roof” appears (1997’s Butterfly), she toned it down. Her highest notes are mostly absent, barely detectable in the texture of the occasional harmony. And in fact, the album’s second number-one single, the Spanish-guitar-inflected “My All,” showcases her smoky lower register. (It’s hard not to hear “My All” as an answer to Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart,” another sultry, Spanish-guitar-filled, deep alto ballad with a very similar melodic structure.)

In “The Roof,” Mariah’s formerly unrestrained melisma just slinks and teases and flirts in the shadows, while a dozen Mariah clones harmonize lushly in sung whispers and sighs. Even in the background, her trills and coos are so delightfully precise that it’s amazing to think this is her holding back. Sometimes she’s just humming melismatically. And the production is top-notch – matching the vocal coquetry with barely audible strings and the hint of a triangle throughout that finally just takes over. It reminded me of something Sasha Frere-Jones once wrote about a Beyonce b-side: “Who feels comfortable with adding so much unexpected, generous harmony to a trifle about a delicious crush?”

The song, as I mentioned, builds off a sample by the gangsta rap crew Mobb Deep – a foreboding arpeggio picked out haltingly on piano keys atop a thrumming, bouncing bass line. The Mobb Deep song is an urban gothic nightmare – all the guns and money and swagger you’d expect, but instead of the usual threats or boasts, it foregrounds the fear itself. Shook – as in “scared to death, scared to look.”

So it’s an odd pairing – this scary Mobb Deep joint with a bit of sexy Mariah Carey cotton candy. It either loses or gains a bit of its oddness, though, when you consider the context.

Butterfly was a pivotal album for Mariah. It came right after she’d broken with her career-enabling ex-husband, Sony’s Tommy Mottola, whom she’d later complain had locked her into a cloying, sugar-pop chastity belt of a public image that obscured the R&B diva within. Fast-forward to today, when she’s perceived as having successfully reinvented herself in the contemporary R&B tradition. To me, contemporary Mariah is about as vocally remarkable as, oh, say, Ashanti (remember her?), but who am I to start railing about kids these days?

Until Butterfly, all we’d ever really seen of Mariah was hints of belly button. But “Honey,” the album’s first video, has her diving into a swimming pool in a bikini and stilettos. And suddenly, she’s an R&B queen! There she is on “Breakdown,” going toe to toe with Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony! (Another candidate for oddest pairing, but again I say – pop romp.) To complete this transition, to move fully from “virgin” to “urban,” she needs cred. She’s gotta go deep. Mobb Deep. Hence, “The Roof.”

And I love it.

Fashion-blogging on Snarkmarket? Just this once. I’ve got to hand it to any men’s fashion site willing to unironically hand its 2009 Clothing Store of the Year award to Old Navy. The photos aren’t quite as lush as the ones at Uncrate, the copy lacks that Esquire sheen, and I don’t approve of body text in reverse type. But taste is the important thing, and Unrefinery has it in spades. I also like that it’s budget-conscious; I’m willing to spend a little on fashion, but you will never see me spend $60 on a reusable grocery bag, no matter how vegetable-dyed its leather straps are. Unlike some prominent men’s fashion sites I know*, Unrefinery seems to accept that a man’s outfit can be complete without a blazer. I don’t agree with everything – shorts have their place, especially during DC’s maybe-hottest-summer-ever. But for the most part, I approve.

And I’m getting this jacket.

Thinking about standing turns out to be a great Ockham’s razor that clarifies almost any problem. If you’re not familiar with it, the legal concept of standing basically says that you can’t bring a lawsuit unless you can show you’ve been (or soon will be) materially harmed in some way. It’s a great way to get a case tossed before it’s even started, which is why it’s a go-to move for any lawyer.

For instance, let’s say Sarah Palin wanted to bring a lawsuit to stop the Cordoba House from being built near the WTC site. So long as she can’t show that she, personally, is harmed by its being built, all she can do is say how much she doesn’t like it on TV.

This, essentially, was what Barack Obama, good law professor that he is, said. It’s on private property. You might not like it, but you don’t have standing. Shut up. Later, when he “rolled back” his “support,” what he was really doing (I think) is saying, “We don’t even have to argue the wisdom of it. That’s it. It’s done.” This is the smart lawyer move. Set every other question aside and focus on the one that wins the case.

The Prop 8 case in California also shows standing at work:

Even though Judge Walker did not immediately let same-sex couples in California marry, the ruling provides important insight into the merits of the issues that the Ninth Circuit will consider on appeal. For example, in his ruling today, Judge Walker casts serious doubt on whether the proponents of Prop 8 even have “standing” to pursue an appeal because they do not speak for the state of California, and the official representatives of the state agree that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Standing refers to whether a particular person has a legal right to bring an appeal. In his ruling today, Judge Walker said: “As it appears at least doubtful that proponents will be able to proceed with their appeal without a state defendant, it remains unclear whether the court of appeals will be able to reach the merits of proponents’ appeal. In light of those concerns, proponents may have little choice but to attempt to convince either the governor or the attorney general to file an appeal to ensure jurisdiction.”

Just think about that for a moment: no one, no individual or group, can show that they’re harmed by permitting gay men and women to marry, while those couples can easily show they’re harmed by prohibiting their marriage. You often hear arguments tossed out of the form “how does two men/women marrying hurt you?” as if that question is supposed to incline you to support or permit gay marriage based on a minimalist “it’s none of my business” ethic. And sometimes that feels a little unsatisfying, because “it doesn’t hurt anybody” is a pretty thin grounds for substantive acceptance and equality.

But that’s not what it’s for. In a very real sense, it’s about establishing whether or not someone has the right to speak for or against a legal decision. And that, ultimately, is how the law is shaped.

Now, because the whole point of establishing standing is to formally limit what can be said and who can say it, it comes with all sorts of limitations as part of the package. It ties you to considering issues where you have bodily harm or monetary loss and clear legal ownership. More nebulous kinds of damage, like harm done to animals, the environment, or landmarks, give you fewer places to stand. (This is one reason why the fate of the fishermen in the Gulf is of such interest in the wake of the BP disaster. Killing all those fish doesn’t matter in a tort case except insofar as it hurts the livelihood of fishermen.)

But you can also expand standing by using it as a metaphor for who’s given legitimacy to speak about something in any context, not just a court of law. This is what law professor/author Derrick Bell does in his essay/dialogue “The Rules of Racial Standing,” in Faces at the Bottom of the Well:

FIRST RULE

The law grants litigants standing to come into court based on their having sufficient personal interest and involvement in the issue to justify judicial cognizance. Black people (while they may be able to get into court) are denied such standing legitimacy in the world generally when they discuss their negative experiences with racism or even when they attempt to give a positive evaluation of another black person or of his or her work. No matter their experience or expertise, blacks’ statements involving race are deemed “special pleading” and thus not entitled to serious consideration.

Here’s a quick summary of rules 2-5 (all paraphrases mine):

2. Black judges/jurors are assumed to be partial in cases involving race and are asked to recuse themselves.
3. Enhanced standing is given to blacks who publicly disparage or criticize other blacks.
4. Blacks are actively recruited to refute or condemn outrageous statements made by other blacks.
5. Identifying rules of racial standing helps you understand racism, but cannot help you repeal them.

Obviously, these expanded rules of standing can be applied to plenty of things besides race; #2 became an issue in Prop 8 when critics of Judge Walker argued that a gay man couldn’t be expected to judge a case involving gay marriage without bias. The Daily Show had my favorite take on this:

But let’s even go outside of politics. Journalism turns out to have its own rules of standing, too. Think about media journalism: who has standing to speak? John Gruber at Daring Fireball is definitely an Apple expert and a great writer, but he’s regularly dismissed by many of those we could call (to use the Latin) playa hatas as biased because he only writes about Apple, he’s a self-proclaimed fan of their products, and he’s overwhelmingly positive about them.

This, I think, is the subtext of Jay Rosen’s terrific argument about pursuing a citizen’s agenda in political journalism. In an election — or even in a news cycle — political parties, candidates, interest groups, pundits, and yes, media outlets all have clear things they can win or lose based on how it goes. In other words, as interested parties, they all have standing. But citizens have standing, too:

One of the big advantages of deploying a citizens agenda in campaign coverage is that it substitutes for that default agenda we’re all familiar with: horse race journalism, and the inside baseball style of coverage. Instead of that, this. Use the citizens agenda to shrink the horse race narrative down to a saner size. Meaning: it’s fine to keep track of who’s ahead and point out what the candidates are doing to win. That’s part of politics. But it should not be the big lens through which journalists view the campaign because it’s simply not useful enough for voters.

In fact, the citizens’ standing matters a lot more than those other groups — but it’s overwhelmingly considered last (if at all). That’s partly because besides the ballot box and contrivances like town hall forums and YouTube debates, citizens have very few courts in which they can be heard. (The parties and candidates and pundits don’t have that problem.) We need to find a way to turn that around.

Where else can we take standing? The concept, to me, is so simple, yet so powerful — I’ve got a suspicion that it’s very nearly a universal acid.

I finally read Farhad Manjoo’s much-and-well-maligned “How black people use Twitter” essay. Until I read it, Instant Vintage’s spoofs of the brown Twitter bird and Danielle Belton’s “Things That Are Not Surprising: Black People Use Twitter” were plenty entertaining enough.

When I read the actual essay, though, I thought, “eh, I expected worse.” It actually reminded me a little of Steven Pinker’s take on The Shallows , where what you already know about the author and outlet just gives the writer very little wiggle room. In Pinker’s case, he uses straw men and can be flippant and condescending. With “How black people use Twitter,” it’s the convergence of “Slate doesn’t write about race well” and “Farhad Manjoo can be a superficial tech columnist.” Plus more, I’m sure. At any rate, those are the reasons I thought of, because those are the reasons I don’t regularly read Slate or Manjoo anymore.

That said, it is hilarious to read things like “In April, Edison Media Research released a survey which found that nearly one-quarter of people on Twitter are African-American; the firm noted this was approximately double the percentage of African-Americans in the current U.S. population” and “Are other identifiable groups starting similar kinds of hashtags, but it’s only those initiated by African-Americans that are hitting the trending topics list?” and transfer this to something other than Twitter. “Why can’t white or Asian people get on trending topics? Something about this doesn’t seem right.”

It reminds me of Ross Douthat’s disproportional argument in his “Roots of White Anxiety” op-ed, and the weird sentiment you sometimes encounter where people will say things like, “you can’t get into an Ivy League school unless you’re a minority.”

The Middle East is anxious about what’s perceived as a decline in Arabic:

[C]alls to forestall the language’s demise are accompanied by cautionary tales about parents who encourage their children to learn other “more useful” languages like English and French, only to find that they can scarcely recite the Arabic alphabet when they get to university. Meanwhile, teachers across the region warn about the rise of “Facebook Arabic,” a transliterated form of the language based on the Latin script. Exemplifying their concerns are the oratorical fumbles of some of the region’s younger political leaders like Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, whose shambling inaugural address to the Lebanese parliament provoked much local tittering. Not everyone is amused: Fi’l Amr, a language-advocacy group, has launched a campaign to raise awareness about Arabic’s critical condition by staging mock crime scenes around Beirut depicting “murdered” Arabic letters, surrounded by yellow police tape that reads: “Don’t kill your language.”

Really, though, it’s not actually Arabic that’s suffering, but a particular grapholect, fusha, the Modern Standard Arabic that closely resembles the classical Arabic of the Koran. And fusha has always been more of an imagined commonality binding together the Arab world than a reality.

In a very basic sense, there is no such thing as Arabic; or, at least, there is no single language that all Arabs speak, read, write, and understand. Instead, Arabic is, like English and many other languages, a constellation of various national dialects, regional vernaculars, and social registers bearing different degrees of resemblance to each another. What sets it apart from a language like English is its diglossic nature, whereby the language of literature and formal address (newscasts, political speeches, religious sermons, and so forth) is markedly different, on multiple structural levels, from the language of everyday speech.

You can overstate this, but it’s a little bit like 19th-century Western Europeans watching literacy numbers boom while wringing their hands over the fate of Latin.

As recently as 1970, three out of four Arabs over the age of 15 were illiterate, according to Unesco. Two decades earlier, illiteracy among women was close to 90 per cent. Even in a country like contemporary Egypt – which has long prided itself, as the old saying goes, on reading the books that Iraq writes and Lebanon publishes – less than two-thirds of the population can read. To speak, therefore, of helping restore Arabic to its former glory, or of helping it to “reemerge as a dynamic and vibrant language” as the government of the UAE has recently committed itself to do, is to ignore the reality that Arabic – both in its classical and modern standard incarnation – has never had as many users as it does today. Even taking into consideration the sway that English holds in the private and educational sectors of various countries in the region, or the important position that French occupies in France’s former colonies, it is impossible to pinpoint another moment in the history of the Arab world when so many people could communicate (with varying degrees of ability) in fusha.

This article I’m quoting was written by my friend Elias Muhanna, who blogs about Lebanese politics as Qifa Nabki, and published in The National, then picked up by The Economist. Whoo-hoo! Comp Lit PhDs FTW!

Shaquille O’Neal talks to the NYT about LeBron’s Decision, and where he’ll be taking his talents once he retires:

Are you concerned about the declining fortunes of Cleveland now that you and LeBron James have left?
We would have liked to have given them a better ending.

Have you spoken to LeBron since he signed with the Miami Heat?
No, no.

Did you watch along with the rest of the world when he monopolized ESPN for a night to announce where he was going?
No, I didn’t. One, I was with the kids, and two, I didn’t know it was going to be on TV.

I didn’t watch it, either.
That’s because you’re mature and you’re my age and we have a different mind-set.

Age has given O’Neal perspective.

Do you find it difficult to be an aging athlete?
A little bit. We live in an impatient world. Everybody is always looking for the next big Kobe, the next big LeBron, the next big Twitter.

And did you know that besides Twittering, hosting TV shows, raising his kids, visiting his dad, and hooping it up, Shaq is writing his dissertation?

Do you think you’ll ever be a sports announcer, like Charles Barkley?
Hopefully not. When I’m done playing basketball, I want do something bigger. I’m working on my doctorate right now at Barry University in Florida.

What are you writing your dissertation on?
My topic will be “How Leaders Utilize Humor or Aggression in Leadership Styles.”

You’ve been called the Big Aristotle, among other nicknames.
I’m done with the nicknames. Actually, when I obtain my doctorate, I will not allow people to call me Shaq anymore, either.

What will they call you?
Dr. O’Neal.

It might seem like I’m making fun of Shaq, but I’m really not. (I do think he’s funny.) I like and respect him a lot, all the more so for pursuing whatever he’s been interested in.

In my Kottke post this week on how athletes are different from you or me, I included a quote by Bill Simmons about how Michael Jordan really bordered on sociopathic behavior during the years he contended for a championship. I didn’t mention that the quote is actually from Simmons’s section on Shaquille O’Neal.

Simmons’s point was that Shaq never became quite as great as Jordan, despite having comparable talent, in part because he was a more-well-rounded person; his drive to succeed wasn’t so singularly focused on beating people on the court, except really during his four championship seasons.

This is also one reason Barkley, who was friends with Jordan and battled with him and probably came closest to beating him during his championship years (’93, with the Suns), could never quite get there, and got bogged down with controversies and politics during his career — and yet he’s a better announcer than Jordan ever could be. Definitely a better interview. Probably a better friend. He always had other things on his mind.