Leitura da semana

Imperdível, este After America, de Dexter Filkins, na New Yorker:


(...)

Nasir celebrated the American invasion in 2001, and, in the decade that followed, he prospered, and fathered six children. But now, with the United States planning its withdrawal by the end of 2014, Nasir blames the Americans for a string of catastrophic errors. “The Americans have failed to build a single sustainable institution here,” he said. “All they have done is make a small group of people very rich. And now they are getting ready to go.”

These days, Nasir said, the nineties are very much on his mind. The announced departure of American and NATO combat troops has convinced him and his friends that the civil war, suspended but never settled, is on the verge of resuming. “Everyone is preparing,” he said. “It will be bloodier and longer than before, street to street. This time, everyone has more guns, more to lose. It will be the same groups, the same commanders.” 

(...)

A few weeks ago, Nasir returned to Deh Afghanan. The Taliban were back, practically ignored by U.S. forces in the area. “The Americans have a big base there, and they never go out,” he said. “And, only four kilometres from the front gate, the Taliban control everything. You can see them carrying their weapons.” On a drive to Jalrez, a town a little farther west, Nasir was stopped at ten Taliban checkpoints. “How can you expect me to be optimistic?” he said. “Everyone is getting ready for 2014.”

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Leitura da semana

Joaquín Guzmán, conhecido como El Chapo, será talvez o homem mais procurado pelo FBI na era pós-Bin Laden, escreve o New York Times. Ele é o líder de um poderoso cartel mexicano, responsável por mais de metade das drogas que entram nos EUA, todos os anos. Na sua revista de fim-de-semana, o Times revela quem é este homem e como fez a sua fama e fortuna, até chegar ao lugar que hoje ocupa, como sucessor de Escobar. Um trabalho notável de Patrick Radden Keefe, jornalista da New Yorker.

«One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.»

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Abandonando o Facebookistão

O jornalista Steve Coll, especialista em temas de segurança, serviços secretos e terrorismo, assina esta semana na New Yorker um artigo muito interessante sobre as «leis» que regem o mundo do Facebook.
Coll fala do marketing «terrorista» e das regras ditatoriais, comparando o controlo da rede social sobre os utilizadores ao que o partido comunista chinês exerce sobre os seus militantes. E essa, entre outras, é uma das razões porque decidiu abandoná-lo. O que, acabou por descobrir, também não é assim tão fácil...

Uma crítica sem palavras

Sem palavras. Mesmo. Vejam só esta crítica maravilhosa da New Yorker ao fillme do ano, O Artista.

Clap, clap, clap!

King of King's

Jon Lee Anderson é um dos melhores jornalistas da actualidade, na minha modesta opinião. Nunca li nada dele que ficasse abaixo da excelência. Admiro-o há muitos anos e quando o conheci pessoalmente, no Haiti, parecia uma adolescente envergonhada... estive quase a esticar o bloco e a caneta que trazia nas mãos para lhe pedir um autógrafo. Contive-me, claro. Hoje, sem grande vontade de ler mais coisas sobre Kadafi, dei por mim a mergulhar sem retorno neste belíssimo King of King's, publicado na última edição da New Yorker:

«How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed.

The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures. Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we invade their castles and expose their vanities and luxuries—Imelda’s shoes, the Shah’s jewels. We loot and desecrate, in order to cut them finally, futilely, down to size.»

Steve Jobs at Heaven's gate

  

Muito se escreveu nas últimas 48h sobre Steve Jobs. Destaco, para já, dois textos.

O sempre exemplar obituário do New York Times, Apple’s Visionary Redefined Digital Age:

“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

E uma nota mais breve, na New Yorker, que lhe dedicará a capa na próxima semana, The Next Steve Jobs (And the Last One) :

«Steve Jobs was a geek: he hacked phones, built computers, and wrote code. But he was also an artist: he studied calligraphy, dated Joan Baez, and actually understood what could make a phone sexy. He was a hippie: who else drops out of Reed? But he was an authoritarian, too. He knew what you wanted better than you did, and he was going to give it to you. These yin-yang couplets explain some of his genius and success. So, of course, does his idealism. (He famously once asked a Pepsi executive whether he wanted to spend his life making sugar water.) And then there was the death sentence he lived under. Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004 gave him a new way of looking at things. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life".»

Ipad, o salvador?

Poderá o ipad bater o kindle e salvar o mercado livreiro? É desta pergunta que a New Yorker parte para traçar um retrato do atormentado mundo dos livros, que debate há décadas se o papel terá ou não capacidade para resistir à revolução digital. Depois do esmorecimento da discussão, com a estagnação das vendas no kindle e noutros dispositivos semelhantes (os e-books só representam cerca de 5% do volume de vendas nos EUA), agora é o ipad que surge como grande alternativa ao livro impresso - sobretudo depois do acordo entre a apple e a amazon, prometendo vender novidades e best-sellers por menos de 10 dólares. É ler para crer...

leituras para 11 de Setembro

http://www.economist.com/node/21528258

 The trick in the next ten years will be to win back the trust of allies (especially Pakistan), use force more sparingly, go wherever possible with the grain of Muslim sentiment instead of rubbing against it. But there can be no return to the innocence of September 10th 2001—and, sadly, no end to the vigilance.

http://boutique.lemonde.fr/hors-series/hors-series/hors-serie-monde-la-decennie-ben-laden.html#

Le choc du 11-Septembre, impossible de ne pas y revenir, dix ans après. Le recul du temps n'atténue en rien son intensité. L'effondrement des tours jumelles à New York est associé, dans l'imaginaire de tous, à une destruction radicale décidée par un ennemi invisible qui n'avait rien à négocier, qui ne souhaitait aucun échange. Quel est cet ennemi? D'où vient-il? Comment recrute-t-il? Quelles sont ses aires d'influence? Et après?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/09/04/lower-manhattan-comes-back-to-life.html

Lower Manhattan is a living symbol of civic resilience; it is evidence of how free people can triumph over fear. The neighborhood surrounding Ground Zero has become the fastest-growing in New York City. Daniel Libeskind is part of the influx. The Bronx-raised designer of the Freedom Tower was living in Berlin on 9/11: “I was determined to live in lower Manhattan. And I’m so happy because it’s really coming back to life ... It’s a kind of renaissance.”

http://www.time.com/time/beyond911/#

If the story of the United States has a theme so far in the 21st century, it is surely one of resilience. To hail that spirit on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001, TIME revisited the people who led us, moved us and inspired us, from the morning of the attacks through the tumultuous decade that followed. These astonishing testimonies — from 40 men and women including George W. Bush, Tom Brokaw, General David Petraeus, Valerie Plame Wilson, Black Hawk helicopter pilot Tammy Duckworth, and the heroic first responders of Ground Zero — define what it means to meet adversity, and then overcome it.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2011/09/12/toc_20110905

Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness,” wrote John Updike ten years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with “the false intimacy of television,” from a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

(...)

New York City is filled with children who have no reason to distinguish the eleventh from any other day in September. At some point they’ll learn, but for now, for them, what actually happened could never have happened.

Leitura da semana

(Photoillustration/John Ritter, New Yorker)

De tirar a respiração, este Getting Bin Laden, escrito por Nicholas Schmidle e publicado esta semana na New Yorker.

É raro ler textos desta qualidade e, por isso, recordei logo um dos melhores de sempre, “Black Hawk Down” , de Mark Bowden. Se não leram na altura (foi publicado no Philadelphia Inquirer em 1997), vale a pena seguir o link e ler esta fabulosa reportagem sobre o cerco às tropas norte-americanas em Mogadíscio, na Somália (e sim, foi este o texto que depois Ridley Scott adaptou ao cinema). A sua (re)leitura acaba por ser curiosa agora em que a Somália volta a ser falada nos jornais, pelo agudizar de uma crise que, na verdade, nunca deixou de existir...

Mas voltemos à New Yorker, ao Paquistão e a este texto onde se reconstitui, ao ínfimo pormenor, a operação das forças especiais da marinha norte-americana em Abbottabad. Desde o início, como aqui se revela, os SEALS nunca ponderaram capturar o líder da Al Qaeda. Eles tinham uma única missão: matá-lo.

(...) A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—“enemy killed in action.”
Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, “We got him.”

Leitura da semana

Se virem por aí esta edição da New Yorker, não hesitem: apanhem-na! Além da belíssima capa (da autoria de Barry Blitt), há três razões para gastarem o vosso dinheirinho nesta revista:

1. O artigo Mastering the Machine, escrito por John Cassidy, acompanhando o dia-a-dia de Ray Dalio, o magnata que fundou a Bridgewater Associates e criou o maior e o mais estranho de todos os hedge funds. Assustador...

2. O postal de Los Angeles, «enviado» por Dana Goodyear, que ali encontrou Robert Jobson, o editor de assuntos da realeza do News of the World, escrevendo o seu último artigo, com o sugestivo título: “Hey Becks, Give Posh Our Love: Will’s Baby Message”. Hilariante...!

3. As palavras de Gay Talese, o rei, o mestre, o maior de todos os escribas ainda vivos (se não o conhecem espreitem aqui e corram a comprar todos os seus livros). Infelizmente, o artigo não está acessível online, mas Andy Young faz o favor de escrever sobre esse acontecimento que é publicar um artigo de Talese, e assim ficamos a saber que ele fala sobre um edifício na sua rua onde já abriram (e fecharam) inúmeros restaurantes. Que interessa? Acreditem, ele poderia escrever sobre qualquer coisa, aquelas duas páginas de letrinhas valem o preço de uma assinatura anual da revista. Genial.

Boas leituras!

Leitura da semana

(Foto: João Pina/New Yorker)

Muito se escreveu sobre o Haiti mas o texto de Jon Lee Anderson, na New Yorker, é diferente de tudo o que já leram - garanto-vos! Em Portugal, raros seriam os jornalistas a arriscar um ângulo destes... Já não bastava a reportagem ser escrita na primeira pessoa - por cá, ainda somos sobretudo narradores distantes, tentando passar invisíveis -, como o jornalista não hesitou em assumir o seu papel na história, envolvendo-se na busca desesperada de uma comunidade por comida, colocando ao dispôr a sua carrinha pick-up e intercedendo por eles, junto das autoridades.

We told Nadia and her companions—there were nine of them—to hop into the back of the truck, and we set off to look for food. Despite the rumors, which had attracted several hundred Haitians to the road by the airport, to gather and stare hopefully, no food was being given out there. We drove onto a nearby field where there were tent camps and aid supplies, demarcated with a dozen or more national flags, but it was a bivouac, not a food-distribution point. We asked a U.N. peacekeeper where to find aid; he said he didn’t know. Someone told us that food was being handed out at a factory nearby, where the Dominicans had set up a base, and so we drove there.

Não é ele, obviamente, a personagem principal desta história: é Nadia François, uma mulher que anda por toda a Port-au-Prince, com um grupo de jovens e uma carta do padre da sua comunidade, à procura de mantimentos para os cerca de 300 habitantes do seu bairro (Fidel, em honra do líder cubano...). Uma heroína invulgar, com cadastro nos Estados Unidos, que se torna íntima de todos nós, a cada linha que passa. Pelo meio, conhecemos um sacerdote vodu, ladrões que são mortos nas ruas, voluntários americanos que não dormem. Uma história inesquecível. Obrigada, Jon Lee.