Year: 2003

is going to made into a movie, and it sounds like Shyamalan might direct it.

The LA Weekly has an interesting piece (now also on Alternet) about a black man who takes a DNA test, and what the surprising outcome means for him: Black Like I Thought I Was. Here’s an excerpt:

Like most other black folk, [Wayne] Joseph grew up with an unequivocal sense of his heritage and of himself; he tends toward black advocacy and has published thoughtful opinion pieces on racial issues in magazines like Newsweek. When Joseph decided on a whim to take a new ethnic DNA test he saw described on a 60 Minutes segment last year, it was only to indulge a casual curiosity about the exact percentage of black blood.
(…)
when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian

We went to see it last night. Sean Penn was, as usual, unbelievably good, and the rest of the cast wasn’t bad at all (though I had a hard time believing in Kevin Bacon’s character.) The movie was beautifully shot, and I was impressed by Eastwood’s ability to deal with material so different from his usual fare. I thought the movie was pitch perfect until the last two or three minutes, which I found incredibly schmaltzy. But neither of the two reviews I read seem to have that problem.

It’s a tradition, they do it every year. The Booker judges are saying that the bookies sometimes get it wrong.

Here’s a short piece on how the weather has been used in literature both as subject and to set the mood.

How much more of this crap about what Jhumpa Lahiri wears do we have to put up with? It gets a little bit better after the intro, but only barely.