I’ve been doing research on the Palestine War for some short stories I’m working on. It’s been over a year since I started, and I still come across new information that surprises me. Just today I came across an amazing account of international intrigue. During the Palestine War, Israel was under an arms embargo that forced it to acquire most of its weapons illegally. This newspaper article, dated September 20, 1948, is on Emanuel Zur, one of the Israeli agents involved with smuggling aircraft out of Britain. It reads like a pulp thriller:

EMANUEL ZUR, the man for whom Scotland Yard has been looking since Beaufighters, Mosquitos and Halifaxes vanished from Britain, sipped cognac in the sunshine of the Champs Elysees today and said: “I was the brain behind the deals. The planes are now in Tel Aviv, part of the Jewish Air Force”.

Zur raised his glass again, smiled, and added: “I made the plans which got the warplanes out. But I don’t think I could do it again”.

Michelle Cottle has written a piece for The New Republic on Sarah Palin’s public relations strategy that ends up making a far more interesting point about Facebook in the process:

Of course, unlike other categories of the rich and famous, political celebs (especially populist firebrands) cannot risk being seen as remote or out of touch. But here’s where Palin’s embrace of new media saves the day. Her perky, quirky tweets and chatty Facebook items make her fans feel as though they have a direct line to her—despite the oft-voiced assumption that Palin (like so many pols) does not write most (if any) of her own Facebook posts. Such is the beauty of social networking: It allows a public figure to avoid direct interaction with the public while promoting the illusion of personal connection and involvement.

Cottle’s writing drips with enthusiasm for the “genius” of this strategy. But I think this paragraph reveals a great deal more about social media than it does about Sarah Palin. The whole underpinning of this new kind of campaign is based on faking human interaction through things like Facebook, where its connections are inherently ephemeral and illusory.

I guess my question is—how true is this assertion about the connections we make on Facebook? Because if it’s true when it’s used in this way by politicians, isn’t it also necessarily true about the other connections we make on Facebook? This gets at one of primary reasons why I myself am on hiatus from Facebook at the moment. Very little of what I did while I was on it was actual communication with people. Mostly, it was about having the feeling of being connected to people by virtue of being privy to random tidbits about their lives that they chose to share. Once I came to realize how disconnected I actually was I grew disenchanted with the whole thing.

If Cottle is right about this, that what’s so innovative about this approach is the ability to manage a political campaign built entirely on false connectivity and the willingness of people to buy into a kind of self-delusion about how much they really matter, then “beauty” is just about the last word I can think of to describe it.

And if this is what’s at the core of social media interactions—that it’s not about interacting at all but more about giving ourselves the illusion of being connected to one another—then we need to rethink the kind of value we place on things like Facebook and Twitter.

Lately I’ve taken an interest in anything written by Conor Friedersdorf. He has an excellent knack for constructing thorough, intelligent arguments to back up his points (if this sounds like it should be a given for political writers, trust me—it’s not). And beyond that, he’s fun to read whenever he systematically deconstructs the nonsense of political party hacks, like what he did this week to Bill Kristol:

In other words, Mr. Kristol has offered exactly zero solutions. “At a moment like this, talking points are not enough,” he writes, having published a piece that is all vague talking points, and bereft of any specific suggestions. The moment requires “radical choice,” he says, but offers none. Defending “bold and seemingly impolitic or impractical ideas,” he neither names nor endorses any of them. “Belt-tightening and program-trimming, more transparency and greater efficiency, are not enough,” he writes, without offering anything more.

Mr. Kristol is calling on the Republic [sic] Party to do something radical without saying what, or even seeming to care.

Brando Skyhorse has some excellent advice for aspiring writers that he has garnered from the nineteen years he spent trying to get his first book published. This is one of my favorite points:

Work hard AND smart. It’s not enough to write 1,000 words a day IF you keep making the same mistakes. Diligence is only half the solution. The other half is evolution. Your writing has to evolve. It should look, sound, and read differently now than it did six months ago. That’s because your perspective as a writer should be different now than it was six months ago. You should be in a different place because you’ve been reading new writers, getting fresh perspectives on your work from new readers, and trying different things in your writing.

Updated to Add: A writer friend of mine asks whether or not this is a misleading suggestion. After all, if you write a thousand words a day, won’t your writing necessarily get by virtue of practicing your craft? I would agree that your writing can and does get better the more you write. But I think Skyhorse’s advice is still solid. Reading more writing is just as important as writing more often in the process of becoming a better writer, and I think that’s a point that’s not made often enough.

The Daily Show has been to Arizona more and more over the last year. Their website even boasts a “Best Moments from the Great State of Arizona” page with clips of correspondents raking Arizona laws and politicians over the coals. Last night’s show featured yet another instance of brutally honest mockery, this time aimed at Arizonan State Representative Carl Seel. Olivia Munn reports:

(Watch on TheDailyShow.com)

At this point in the game, I have long since lost the ability to be surprised at what politicians in Arizona are capable of.

I’ve just finished reading an incredible article by Joshua Wolf Shenk that highlights the work of psychiatrist George Vaillant with the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The study followed (and is still following) the lives of 268 Harvard college kids from the time they were in college, most during the late 1930′s and early 1940′s, until their deaths. The article’s title, “What Makes Us Happy?”, hardly does it justice. It’s a sweeping epic of a piece. It discusses the history the study itself, the evolution and trends of psychoanalysis, the lives of men who took part, the personal life of George Vaillant himself, and what conclusions we can draw (and more often, what questions are raised) from the vast amount of data collected during the seventy-plus years that the study has been conducted.

It’s hard for me to pull only one passage that exemplifies its remarkable depth, but this one will do as well as any:

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way? At times, Vaillant wears his lab coat and lays out his findings matter-of-factly. (“As a means of uncovering truth,” he wrote in Adaptation to Life, “the experimental method is superior to intuition.”) More often, he speaks from a literary and philosophical perspective. (In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs. Later, after taking a stab at answering several Big Questions I had asked him—Do people change? What does the study teach us about the good life?—he said to me, “Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?”

A rider alert from SunTran’s website this past weekend reads:

Elephant Walk Could Delay Downtown Buses

On Sunday, July 4 from around 2:30 to 4 p.m., buses in the downtown area may experience minor delays due to the circus elephants walking from the Tucson Convention Center to the train depot. We ask passengers to be patient during this time.

I wonder what, exactly, passengers who decided not to be patient during that time could’ve done about it.