If You Haven't Read Them, You Should

Hilton Als, who normally writes for the New Yorker, has a beautiful piece on Michael Jackson in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books. It begins:

It's 1972, and "Ben," the fourteen-year-old star's first solo hit, is everywhere. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy's tormentors; eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson's early signature song—certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context, and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto—whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.

It's that last sentence that stood out to me (beacon on the hill, candle in a dark room).

Not topically related, but for a different take on celebrity, John Krolik tries to figure out how Stephon Marbury has become, well, Stephon Marbury. He asks:

But here’s the question that begs to be answered above all others: How did all of this happen? It was only two years ago that Marbury was a max-money starting point guard for the New York Knicks. How did end up spending most of his waking hours talking into a webcam, baring his soul to any of the increasingly few people willing to listen? It’s likely nobody really knows the answer to that question, including Marbury himself. But a look into Marbury’s journey to this point reveals reasons to believe that the factors behind Marbury’s fall from grace are more complex than they appear at first blush.

Well worth a read, if you have the time (thanks, TH).

And, thanks to a post on EotAW, I stumbled across an excellent discussion of George Scialabba's What are Intellectuals Good For? at Crooked Timber (the introduction is here, with the first two responses here and here).