Whoops

Neglected the journalism blog again because I remembered I also like writing about fiction and music and cats and stuff.

If you're interested in reading any of that in no particular order, you can check out my Tumblr: cnell.tumblr.com.

Review: Sweet Tooth

Originally published in the Greymouth Star, 10 January 2013

Imagine Jane Austen writing a spy novel set in 1970s London, and you’ll have a decent idea what to expect of the latest book from Atonement author Ian McEwan.

Beautiful, conservative Serena Frome, a third-rate mathematician with a passion for books, is groomed for recruitment to the British intelligence service by her much-older lover. She is assigned to the “Sweet Tooth” project, a secret effort to fight the Communism culture war by funnelling government money to anti-Communist writers.

Serena’s first recruit is Tom Haley, a charming artistic sort who writes short stories about lust, betrayal and self-delusion. Her fascination with these stories leads to an attraction to Tom and they begin an exciting affair, spending their weekends going to classy restaurants, drinking champagne and discussing literature.

But the longer the affair continues, the harder it is for Serena to keep her mission a secret or avoid the suspicions of MI5 – especially when Tom uses their money to write a dystopian novel about the excesses of capitalism.

Sweet Tooth is a classic McEwan book, with the same slow pace and long, introspective chapters as Atonement and On Chesil Beach. The Cold War discussions are interesting if you like history and politics, and the descriptions of British intelligence call to mind the dimly-lit bureaucratic intrigue of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

But if you’re hoping for a thriller, you’ll be disappointed. Early hints of violence and danger never go anywhere, and the only real surprise is a clever plot twist at the very end, which makes you want to go through the book all over again to pick up the clues you missed.

Orwell on Book Reviewers

One of my indulgences over Christmas was a little collection of George Orwell essays, one of those "Great Ideas" books from Penguin. I'd only read 1984 and Animal Farm before this, and I'd like to read his journalism and nonfiction - particularly now that his work isn't being crammed down my throat by high school English teachers.

I enjoyed (kinda) his essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," in which he describes such professionals as sad, frumpy little men surrounded by dusty papers and half-empty cups of tea.

"[T]he prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash ... but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time."

Man, Orwell must have been a hoot at parties.

Richard Engel, Superman

I'm relieved to hear that NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his team are safe after being kidnapped and held for five days in Syria:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Engel's ordeal reminded me of his theory about the four stages of stress a reporter goes through while covering war zones, outlined in his book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq:

• Stage One: I'm invincible. Nothing can hurt me. I'm Superman.
• Stage Two: What I'm doing is dangerous. I might get hurt over here. I'd better be careful.
• Stage Three: What I'm doing is really dangerous. I am probably going to get hurt over here no matter how careful I am. Math and probability and time are working against me.
• Stage Four: I have been here too long. I am going to die over here. It is just a matter of time. I've played the game too long.

It's not time just yet, thank goodness. Welcome back, Richard.

Liberty Booze

If you want to brush up on the basics of the American Constitution, you could do worse than making yourself a drink (or nursing a hangover, in my case) and curling up with What Prohibition Has Done to America by Fabian Franklin.

Fabian was a civil engineer and mathematician who went on to become editor of the Baltimore News and later associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

He worked himself into a conservative fury over Prohibition in 1922, accusing supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment of perverting the Constitution, undermining America's respect for the law, destroying our federal system and weakening our sense of individual liberty.

The Founding Fathers, he declared, "did not for a moment entertain the idea of imposing upon future generations, through the extraordinary sanctions of the Constitution, their views upon any special subject of ordinary legislation. Such a proceeding would have seemed to them far more monstrous, and far less excusable, than that tyranny of George III and his Parliament which had given rise to the American Revolution."

Study Project

I've given in and bought a Kindle. The part of me that loves rummaging through second-hand bookshops is horrified, but in the end practicality won out. My reading list is too long, and I don't have the time or money to buy hardcover books, or wait for paperback editions, and then lug them around in boxes every time I change addresses. I'll still buy books that have special meaning to me, but for the most part I've gone digital.

I plan to step up my reading on journalism and politics, and the Kindle could be really useful for that. I can download free resources from websites like Project Gutenberg and then step away from the Internet to avoid distractions (ahem), and I can buy the latest books without traveling to a city or shipping them all the way from America. Not a lot of fancy politically-themed bookshops in Greymouth, you see.

What I'm hoping is that by following journalists and scholars on social media and doing independent study while learning basic reporting skills at my job, I can gain some insight and sharpen my focus on where I want my career to go. A four-year journalism degree is beyond my reach for now, but I suspect I can learn quite a lot just by knowing where to look.

We'll see how it goes. Expect more ramblings about what I'm reading, along with the usual snarky jokes. Like these ones!

Review: The Landgrabbers

Originally published in the Greymouth Star, 27 September 2012

Environmental journalist Fred Pearce adds to his list of reasons why the planet is in big trouble with The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth, which chronicles his year travelling the globe to find out why the super-rich are buying as much foreign land as possible.

Capitalism cops the most scrutiny as Pearce describes Saudi oil billionaires snapping up land for agribusiness in Ethopia, Christian evangelists preaching to the natives in Kenya while draining their wetlands, and bulldozers flattening Asian forests so Westerners can have cheap paper and sugar. Even New Zealand's Crafar Farms warrant a mention.

The corporations bring in big profits but contribute little to the country in return, while locals often find their ancestral lands sold out from under them. In the meantime the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. "Will they feed the world," says Pearce, "or just the bottom line?"

The Politics of The Hunger Games

I really may need to see this movie, and maybe even buy the books. Who doesn't enjoy a good old-fashioned political dystopia story?

And as the Hollywood Reporter points out, the best part is that everyone can read their own ideology into this future North America where the government maintains order by forcing children to fight to the death:

Occupy-Wall-Street liberals are loving the way the film portrays an extraordinary gap between the rich and poor as simply an innate evil. ... There’s plenty in Hunger Games for right-wingers, too. The most obvious message being that government overreach can lead to tyranny.

Here's my favourite, of course:

Writing for the Frederick Douglass Foundation, Mack Rights argues that there’s not only a powerful conservative message in Hunger Games but a Christian one, as well, since the story takes place after "liberals have succeeded in erasing God and Christ from the culture completely by successfully creating their own utopia – which is really a dystopian nightmare for anyone not in the liberal ruling class."

Throw in Lionsgate's blatant effort to cause fandom drama by comparing The Hunger Games to Twilight and you've got a lovely bit of political geek escapism.

Review: Steve Jobs

Originally published in The Dominion Post's "Your Weekend", 26 November 2011.

Since the death of Steve Jobs on October 5, the stories surrounding him have taken on a life of their own, linking Jobs with everything from the glories of American capitalism to the rebellious spirit of the Arab Spring. Fortunately, biographer Walter Isaacson has the skill and insight to tell the story of an extraordinary person on a human scale.

Drawn from over 40 exclusive interviews with Jobs over two years, along with interviews with his family, friends, colleagues and competitors, Steve Jobs: A Biography pays tribute to a modern genius while avoiding the notorious “reality distortion field” that surrounded him throughout his life.

Open and reflective during his struggle with cancer, Jobs gave Isaacson his full co-operation and urged people to be honest about his mistakes.

The book starts with his childhood in the San Francisco Bay area and follows his career from beginning to end. At each step – co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in his father’s garage, revolutionising personal computers with the Macintosh, creating animated movies at Pixar or tackling the music market with iTunes – Jobs strived to combine cutting-edge technology with art and imagination.

Journo Book Club

I like reading books written by journalists, mainly because I find stories more interesting when I know a bit about the person telling them. The last few I've read make for a nice cross-section.

I enjoyed The Influencing Machine by NPR's Brooke Gladstone, a comic book (of all things) about the history of the media and how we consume and shape it:

The media machine is a delusion. What we're really dealing with is a mirror: an exalting, degrading, tedious, and transcendent funhouse mirror of America. Actually, media is a plural noun: we're dealing with a whole mess of mirrors. They aren't well calibrated; they're fogged, and cracked. But you're in there, reflected somewhere, and so is everyone else (including people you dislike).

An Hour With Fatima Bhutto

Original post at The Lumière Reader as part of their coverage of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

The names march down the book’s cover in bold white print: “Granddaughter to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, executed 1979. Niece to Shahnawaz Bhutto, murdered 1985. Daughter of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, assassinated 1996. Niece to Benazir Bhutto, assassinated 2007.”

But when Fatima Bhutto took the stage at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, casual in jeans and a loose white blouse, she seemed determined to resist that introduction. “It’s not on my business card, actually, who I’m related to,” she joked. “You could just say Writer.”

It’s a fitting contrast. Fatima’s memoir Songs of Blood and Sword is a political history of the Bhutto dynasty in Pakistan, but it is also an expression of grief and an act of political defiance. In promoting the book, she is attempting to tear down the myths and deceptions that have defined her family for the last four decades.

Interview: Paul Gilding on "The Great Disruption"

Original post at The Lumière Reader as part of their coverage of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival.

After 35 years of activism and social entrepreneurship to address climate change and sustainability, including a stint as head of Greenpeace International, Paul Gilding has reached a stark conclusion: “We need to forget about ‘saving the planet.’”

In The Great Disruption: How the Climate Crisis Will Transform the Global Economy, Gilding argues that not only is it too late to avoid a global crisis, but that the crisis has already started. Since the financial meltdown of 2008 we’ve seen rising food and oil prices, new evidence of ecosystem collapse, extreme weather and wildfires, all in the face of an exponential increase in world population and energy consumption.

It’s now a simple matter of maths, physics and system dynamics: our global economic footprint is past the limit where our planet can support it. “We didn’t change,” Gilding says. “So now change will be forced upon us by actual physical consequences” – including energy and food shortages, refugee migrations, and widespread geopolitical conflict.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but Gilding has clearly been through this debate countless times and from countless different angles, and he’s gathered plenty of evidence to back him up. I had quite a few “Yes, but...!” moments as I read the book, only to have them persuasively addressed several pages later.

The real sticking point of The Great Disruption is whether we can follow Gilding through to the confident “Let’s get to work!” attitude he eventually reaches. After all, he says, after a few million years the planet will recover from the worst we can do to it. Our job is to muster up the courage, compassion and innovation that is necessary to revolutionise the economy and save our civilisation, and he believes that humanity is up to the challenge.

A few weeks into his international book tour, I called Paul Gilding in New York City to find out what makes him so sure.

Writers & Readers

I'll be writing reviews and covering the festival for The Lumière Reader again this year, so I've got a frantic but interesting weekend coming up. 

My main assignments are Paul Gilding, former head of Greenpeace International whom I interviewed last month; Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish from Palestine, whose book I really ought to start reading; and my biggest challenge, Fatima Bhutto from Pakistan, who has some opinions about America's foreign policy that she'd like to discuss. I'll probably try to sit in on a couple of the panel discussions as well. 

One day I'll do stuff like this for a living.

John Galt and Me

Here’s the kind of person I am: I read Atlas Shrugged as a joke.

Political satire is one of my favourite things, and this novel from the 1950’s has been gathering a lot of snark potential. Members of the Tea Party keep name-dropping Ayn Rand, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin requires his staffers to read the book, and now a film version is being released on – you guessed it – 15 April. (The deadline for taxes is actually 18 April this year but whatever.)

One day as I was goofing off on Twitter, I had an idea. I’d get the book from the library (the socialist library, HA!) and live-tweet my reactions as I read it – kind of a “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” thing for my liberal friends. I was so gleeful about it that I went to the library that same afternoon.

And that’s when I discovered that Atlas Shrugged is 1,168 pages long.

The joke was on me, but I’d already announced my plans to everybody – I couldn’t back out now. I took the heavy paperback home with me and got started. One month, eight days and $7.00 in library fines later, here’s what I discovered.

Beyond the farm and the theme park

Wellington-based physicist Sir Paul Callaghan was recently named New Zealander of the Year. I had the opportunity to interview him about his latest book in April 2009. Originally published on the Futureintech website.

As a boy growing up in Wanganui in the Sixties, Paul Callaghan saw physics everywhere. “It was the age following Sputnik. There was a big emphasis on science. And physics is beautiful – it was always a part of my life. I got up to stuff, basically. I built my first crystal radio set when I was ten or eleven, and I was able to pick up two radio stations. It’s life-changing for any young boy.”

Fifty years later, Dr. Callaghan is one of the leading physicists in New Zealand, author or co-author of three books and over 200 scientific articles, and the founding director of the Wellington-based company Magritek. But while he views scientific innovation as the key for New Zealand’s prosperity, he feels that we’re held back from our full potential by a myth of our own making.

In his latest book, Wool to Weta: Transforming New Zealand’s Culture & Economy, Callaghan makes the case that New Zealand needs to shift from its overreliance on tourism and agriculture, and invest in a new economy based on science, technology, and intellectual property. As he notes in the book’s preface, “David Lange once said, cheekily, that New Zealand’s destiny was to be a theme park, while Australia’s destiny was to be a quarry. This book tells the story of how we must move beyond the farm and the theme park if we are to build sustainable prosperity in New Zealand, protecting our natural environment in the process.”

Wrestling with Zinn

Once when I was eleven or twelve, my dad kept my brothers and me at the kitchen table after dinner. In a grim voice, he warned us that there were big changes coming to America’s school system and we would have to be on our guard.

Dad told us that schools were about to start rewriting American history and indoctrinating their students with a politically-correct ideology called Multiculturalism. The goal of this change was to empower other countries and cultures by making us feel ashamed of our Western heritage.

Instead of learning that Christopher Columbus was the heroic discoverer of the New World, we would be told that he was a bad man who murdered the Indians. Instead of learning about the noble ideas of the Founding Fathers, we would be told that they were atheists and slave owners. If we didn’t pay attention, our teachers might trick us into thinking that America is evil and send the quality of education in this country down the drain.

Eighteen years later, I can say with relief and some bemusement that multicultural education has not led me to intellectual ruin. (Though of course that’s exactly what an indoctrinated person would say... Just kidding, Dad.) What it has done is encourage me to rethink old assumptions and work harder to empathise with different points of view. In a lot of ways it’s the driving force behind my love of travel and my curiosity about people.

The latest step in this journey was to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. I knew almost nothing about him when he passed away a little over a year ago, but my progressive friends responded to his death with such emotion that I bought the book that same afternoon. The thick, densely-written paperback sat glaring at me from my bookshelf until this past Christmas, when I set the goal of finishing it by the end of my holiday.

Interview: Adrian Wooldridge

Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor of The Economist and author of God is Back, discusses the global resurgence of evangelical religion. Original post at The Lumière Reader.

Former Evangelical Christians are usually difficult to spot. Many of us have had years to adjust since we put our days of Christian rock and Bible study groups behind us, and aside from a few telltale signs like a weird over-enthusiasm for the Theory of Evolution, we manage to blend in with the secular world pretty well.

But every so often something puts Evangelicals in the headlines – a movie like Jesus Camp comes out, or Sarah Palin starts talking about, well, anything really – and suddenly there we are plain as day, wincing in recognition, smiling tightly at the inevitable jokes. As much as we try to ignore it, this part of our culture isn’t going anywhere; and lately it’s been demanding more and more of our attention.

As someone who recently joined the ranks of “spiritual-not-religious” critics of the church, I found God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World to be an eye-opening but uncomfortable read. Co-authors Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, writers for The Economist, make the case that instead of fading out in the face of modernity, religion – the American Evangelical brand in particular – is flourishing.

What Good are the Arts?

Original post at The Lumiere Reader.

Anyone who’s had an argument about art knows that it can be as bad as politics or religion for getting our egos riled up. I myself have experienced something close to homicidal rage when a relative of mine declared his love of classical music to be wiser, more sophisticated and closer to God than my love of literature.

So when I attended What Good are the Arts?, a highlight of this year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, I confess that I was gleefully hoping for a fight. The topic was a book of the same name by John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford and book critic for the London Sunday Times, who argues that not only is it foolish to say that music is inherently more valuable than literature, but it’s impossible to prove that art benefits society or makes us better people. He was joined by Denis Dutton, a philosopher at the University of Canterbury, and Sarah Thornton, chief writer on contemporary art for The Economist.

Interview: Bryan Bruce

Investigator Bryan Bruce’s new book re-opens the 2000-year-old case file on Jesus of Nazareth’s death. Original post at The Lumiere Reader.

It’s an image that sticks with you. Bryan Bruce, New Zealand documentary filmmaker, is in Israel with his camera crew, on his way to the River Jordan to film a scene at the spot where Jesus of Nazareth was baptised by John.

“I have to be taken under armed escort by the Israeli army,” he tells me over the phone, “with a tank behind me and an armoured personnel carrier in front of me, through a minefield, to get to the River Jordan. I get to the river on this spot, and on the other side are Jordanian tanks and armoured personnel carriers. And the Israelis shout across to the Jordanians, ‘If you don’t want to have your tanks filmed, you might want to move them slightly to the left.’”

This jarring contrast between Biblical mythology and political reality is the challenge of Jesus: The Cold Case, Bruce’s third book and its accompanying documentary. Drawing on his experience as a true crime investigator, Bruce takes on the New Testament narrative of Jesus’ death and comes to a grim conclusion about the role it has played in the religious and ethnic conflicts of the last 2,000 years.

Interview: Michael Otterman

This month I interviewed Michael Otterman, an American writer and human rights consultant, in preparation for his appearance at the 2010 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. The original post can be found at The Lumiere Reader.


In the lead-up to Iraq’s parliamentary elections in March, much of the Western media was optimistic, even congratulatory. Newsweek magazine went so far as to declare “Victory at Last”, heralding the rise of a new democracy in the Middle East. The cover shot was from President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which took place seven years ago this month.

For Michael Otterman, a writer and human rights consultant, the view of Iraq is shockingly different. “There are children in Iraq who were born seven years ago who have known war their entire lives,” he told me over the phone from New York. “It’s been horrendous. By some estimates there have been 600,000 deaths, and displacement which is unparalleled in the Middle East.”

This is the grim focus of his second book, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage. Co-authored by Richard Hil with input from Paul Wilson, it examines the devastating effects of the war on Iraqi citizens, who have been largely ignored by Western governments and the mainstream press. The book includes first-hand experiences from people of all backgrounds, collected from blogs, diaries, and personal interviews.