Author: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.

The Lester Bangs of Saudi Arabia?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Music, The Media

[Gelf]

A few months ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Accolade, a Saudi Arabian rock band composed of female college students. Most of the reaction to this story focused on the band—their MySpace friend count went from 17 to more than 1,000 in 24 hours—even as no one seemed willing to admit that they sound like a watered-down Evanescence (a thought that didn’t even seem possible five minutes ago).

Anyway, a few of the story’s quotes come from a young Saudi reporter named Hasan Hatrash. Hatrash is a musician too, but he also writes about the Middle-East music scene from the inside. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful person, and, in a new interview at Gelf, I talked to him about rock and roll, at home and abroad.

(Thanks to my editor, Michael Gluckstadt, for the original story idea.)

Pop Orwell

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Splice Today]

On December 21, 1940, George Orwell reviewed Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for a London newspaper.

“Simply as a film,” Orwell writes, “it has very great faults.” Yet he goes on to predict the film’s future impact: “What is Chaplin’s peculiar gift? It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man. . . . If our Government had a little more imagination, they would subsidize The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany.”

What can we learn from such a review (besides the fact that Orwell had a barely latent crush on Paulette Goddard)? That Orwell consumed precarious amounts of pop culture, a point I try to make in my essay-slash-review of two new volumes of Orwell’s nonfiction (edited by George Packer) over at Splice.

The plight of a mid-major (updated)

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Sports, The Media

espnxavier

With approximately seven minutes to go before my beloved Xavier Musketeers take on Duke, I decide to click on ESPN.com (beta!).

Big mistake. They’re highlighting what promises to be a great Saturday of college hoops, with stories and pictures from UConn, Gonzaga, Purdue, and, of course, Duke. Missing from this list is Duke’s OPPONENT, even though XU is currently ranked seventh in the country, one spot behind the Blue Devils. In fact, the only “Xavier” mentioned on ESPN’s front page is Xavier Henry, the top player in the 2009 recruiting class.

At least I don’t have to worry about hearing Clark Kellogg call them “EGGSavier.” I hope.

UPDATE: Egads. Also, this year’s Duke squad might be their most annoying since J.J. Redick: The Early Years. Can we bring back The Landlord?

Stating the Obvious

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Sports, The Media

[x-posted at Gelf]

Recession and print-death be damned—this week’s Sports Illustrated is surprisingly good, with arresting essays on Baron Davis and Russian sports moguls. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

Time was, Rick Reilly owned SI‘s back page, sending off his weekly “Life of Reilly” to an often snarky reception. We scrutinize Reilly for everything from his bottle-cap conspiracies to his tooth fetish, mostly because his go-to gambit—the obscure, heartwarming anecdote—has become too obvious to parody or mock, though not to be a little sad.

Reilly now works for ESPN, so his old magazine has (re)christened its back page “Point After.” And therein lies the hitch with this week’s issue. In “Gift Idea for the Meddling Parent,” Selena Roberts begins by describing a company that tests kids’ levels of ACTN3, a gene that may predict whether they’ll be better at explosive or endurance sports. Actually, Roberts begins with a meditation on Build-a-Bear, but I’m not here to fault her metaphors; instead, I’ll point out that her discussion merely summarizes a recent front-page New York Times story (which, to her credit, she does cite).

From there, Roberts turns to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, specifically his argument that hockey players born early in the year have a far better shot at success. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is: just about every review of Outliers, from Business Week‘s to Entertainment Weekly‘s, highlights this episode.

But Roberts offers less a book review than a book report, again settling for a mere summary of Gladwell’s conclusions. In fact, Roberts’s contribution to the column amounts to getting bland quotes from an academic and from the president of that testing company. Her juxtaposition of the Times story and the Gladwell book produces a lame joke—instead of testing your kids, screw in April!—but no serious points, even as the specialization of children’s sports remains a serious issue. (See Tom Farrey’s excellent Game On.)

While SI hired Roberts from the New York Times at around the same time they lost Reilly, she wasn’t a direct replacement. (In fact, like the Lakers, “Point After” goes at least 10 deep.) Still, it’s worth paralleling their columns. In replacing Reilly’s love of the obscure with Roberts’s love of the obvious, SI is erring in the opposite direction. Roberts’s column is basically a pastiche of points lifted straight from the Times and Gladwell, and, while I’m not exactly pining for the return of Reilly, I do think someone should call her on it, just as everyone and their dentist calls Reilly on his every move.