Dead Presidents

National Journal: How Two Presidents Helped Me Deal With Love, Guilt, and Fatherhood →

What an amazing story by Ron Fournier in the National Journal. For those of you who are so anti-George W. Bush that you can’t see him as a human being and can’t feel anything but anger or repulsion towards him, take a moment, read this article, and remember, “Love that boy.”

David Ignatius: In Barack Obama's second term, time to be like Ike on the military →

Interesting commentary by David Ignatius which suggests that President Obama should look to General Eisenhower and two really good recent books on Eisenhower’s Administration — Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower In War and Peace (BOOK•KINDLE) and Evan Thomas’s Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle To Save the World (BOOK•KINDLE) — for examples on how Ike delicately handled several crises in foreign relations and attempted to reign in potential excesses by the very American military that he had spent his entire career serving.

Death and Taxes: The Suckiest Day In Presidential History →

Thanks to reader @BrianAbrams for sharing this fantastic piece on the tragic death of President-elect Franklin Pierce’s only surviving son, Benjamin, in a horrific train accident which took place exactly 160 years ago today. You guys should definitely check this out.

Melville House: Their Peculiar Ambitions: Forty-Four Stories About Our Forty-Four Presidents →

I have mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Melville House, a fairly new independent publisher based in Brooklyn that publishes some really fantastic books. Some of their books are very unique, and they’ve recently created The Neversink Library, which is a wonderful collection of some little-known classics and even somewhat odd titles, many of which have been out-of-print or overlooked for years. As an example, I was sent The Right Way To Wrong, a fun collection of writings from Harry Houdini. Beyond the interesting books that Melville House publishes, I enjoy browsing through their catalog because, as I have definitely written before, the cover art of Melville House books is stunning. Whether it is one person or an entire design team, the person(s) responsible for the catchy cover art deserve some major credit for Meville House’s appeal.

As for the reason behind my link —- Melville House has recently been running a series of articles on their website that I simultaneously enjoy and envy. In Their Peculiar Ambitions: Forty-Four Stories About Our Forty-Four Presidents, forty-four different writers have contributed their take on individual Presidents and will continue to do so until each President has been covered by Election Day. I’ve been enjoying the series for obvious reasons; I’ve been envious for reasons just as obvious: I wish I would have been asked to contribute! I want to be the internet’s go-to guy for the Presidents! (Picture those last two sentences being said in a whiny voice for full effect)

Oh well, I’ll still enjoy it, and think that you will, too. Check out Melville House’s Their Peculiar Ambitions: Forty-Four Stories About Our Forty-Four Presidents, with updated contributions every Tuesday from now until Election Day!

If you are curious about how I ranked a certain President when I did my first annual Presidential Rankings in July, I have created an easy-to-access page with the rankings and the links to each individual entry. If you go to the deadpresidents.tumblr.com main page, you’ll find the Presidential Rankings page in the sidebar alongside my desperately-needs-to-be-updated bio, Original Essays, and Essential Books pages.

Go check it out, like me on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Google+ or any other social networking medium, share Dead Presidents with your friends and family, send me gifts and love (but mostly gifts), and enjoy!

GQ: Robert Draper on Presidential Debates →

Quick Article Recommendations

I’m catching up on my Instapaper account, and I wanted to suggest a couple of President-related articles that you may be interested in checking out:

•Obama’s Way (Vanity Fair, October 2012) — Michael Lewis spends six months covering the Obama White House

•Joe Biden Isn’t Finished (New York Magazine, September 2, 2012) — Awesome look at our equally awesome Vice President

•Bill Clinton: Who Is This Guy? (New York Magazine, January 20, 1992) — An early profile (published on my 12th birthday!) of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton by Joe Klein.

•Superman Comes to the Supermarket (Esquire, November 1960) — Normal Mailer on the 1960 Presidential campaign of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy

Those last two articles were found via Longform.org, which is a site that I love to check out in order to find interesting, feature-length articles.

New York Times Magazine: Why Does Anyone Root for Incompetent, Failing Teams? →

Why should I be surprised to realize that this article by Steve Almond is about my favorite football team? Considering the fact that I’ve spent my life as a fan of the Oakland Raiders and Sacramento Kings, it would seem as if being a tortured sports fan should be easier and easier. It’s not. I guess I should feel lucky that I don’t have a favorite NHL or MLB team otherwise I’d have four shitty teams to follow instead of just two.

AND Magazine: 1,000 Nights of Raw →

We interrupt history to bring you something completely different! Do me a favor and go check out my lead story on the AND Magazine website this weekend: a look at Monday’s 1,000th episode of WWE Monday Night Raw.

It would really help me and make me very happy and lead me to spend a couple of hours tonight answering YOUR questions if you could go to my story at AND Magazine by clicking this link and then clicking the Facebook “LIKE” button right underneath my handsome face and byline in the upper left corner! I’ll probably make this request several times tonight until I get at least 50 “likes”, so PLEASE go do it right now! You don’t even have to read the story! It’s good; I promise!

Thank you!

AND Magazine: "Silver and Black" →

Check out my latest book review for AND Magazine, a look at Peter Richmond’s Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders (BOOK•KINDLE) from It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Badasses is a change of pace from the normal non-fiction books that I review, but as a fellow long-time (and long-suffering) fan of the Oakland Raiders, Richmond has written a book that allows me to experience the glory days of my favorite franchise despite the fact that I was born a couple of years after the legendary Coach Madden retired and moved from roaming the sidelines to calling the game from the broadcast booth. Take a look at my review for more info and go get the book!

The Living Room Candidate →

Big thanks to redcloud for pointing me in the direction of this awesome website featuring Presidential campaign commercials dating back to Eisenhower vs. Stevenson I in 1952!

Reading Recommendations

I haven’t done this in a long time, so I better list some of my reading recommendations before the list gets too much longer. As always, this is a rundown of some of the most interesting articles that I’ve been reading:

•AMERICAN MOZART (The Atlantic Monthly, May 2012)

•ROBERT CARO’S BIG DIG (New York Times Magazine, Apr. 15, 2012)

•HOW THE WORLD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE CLUB WAS BORN (Time Magazine, Apr. 12, 2012)

•FRIENDS AND EXES: JFK’S REPUBLICAN ALLIES (Time Magazine, Apr. 12, 2012)

•THE DESPOT’S CHILD (The Atlantic Monthly, May 2012)

•WHERE IS GEORGE W. BUSH? (Politico, Apr. 2, 2012)

•INTERVIEW: BEHIND THE SNARL OF CM PUNK (Chicago Tribune, Mar. 27, 2012)

•PIPE BOMB! MORE FROM THE CM PUNK (Chicago Tribune, Mar. 27, 2012)

•MURDER IN TIBET’S HIGH PLACES (Smithsonian Magazine, Apr. 10, 2012)

•THE EXCLUSIVE STORY BEHIND DICK CHENEY’S HEART TRANSPLANT (ABCNews.com, Mar. 26, 2012)

•WHY DID KOBE GO TO GERMANY? (Grantland, Apr. 11, 2012)

•PAINTBALLING WITH HEZBOLLAH (Vice.com, April 2012)

•WHY THE TITANIC STILL FASCINATES US (Smithsonian Magazine, March 2012)

•GENERAL GRANT IN LOVE AND WAR (Smithsonian Magazine, Feb. 14, 2012)

•BILL SIMMONS: WHO SHOULD RAISE THE NBA MVP TROPHY? (Grantland, Apr. 3, 2012)

•WHY SHOULDN’T A PRESIDENT BE A GOOD POLITICIAN? (CNN.com, Mar. 19, 2012)

•SLAVERY’S LAST STRONGHOLD: MAURITANIA (CNN.com, March 2012)

•THE FRAGILE TEENAGE BRAIN: JONAH LEHRER ON CONCUSSIONS IN HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL (Grantland, Jan. 10, 2012)

•THE DUTCH EUTHANIZE THEIR ELDERLY, AND OTHER SCARY GOP LIES ABOUT EUROPE (The Atlantic, Mar. 14, 2012)

•JAMES CAMERON REACHES DEEPEST SPOT ON EARTH (Associated Press, Mar. 25, 2012)

•JAMES CAMERON NOW AT OCEAN’S DEEPEST POINT (NationalGeographic.com, Mar. 25, 2012)

•THE GREAT RUSE: THE COMEDIC GENIUS WHO ROCKED WRESTLING (CNN.com, Apr. 7, 2012)

•BIN LADEN’S FINAL DAYS: BIG PLANS, DEEP FEARS (CNN.com, Mar. 16, 2012)

•TRACKING THE ASCENSION OF PAT SUMMITT (ESPN.com, Mar. 19, 2012)

•LINCOLN’S MAILBAG (New York Times, Nov. 12, 2012)

•THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON METAPHORS (New York Times, Nov. 14, 2010)

•JAPAN’S 1,000-YEAR-OLD WARNING: HOW COLLECTIVE MEMORY SAVED LIVES DURING JAPAN’S TSUNAMI (Los Angeles Times, Mar. 11, 2012)

•TRAVELS OF A TEENAGE PRINCE (New York Times, Nov. 13, 2010)

•THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE OF TONGA (New Zealand Herald, Sept. 17, 2006)

•WHEN ENGINEERING FAILS (Salon.com, Mar. 25, 2012)

•THE BEHAVIORAL SINK (Cabinet Magazine, Issue 42, Summer 2011)

•THE BEST OF ENEMIES: OP-ED COLUMN BY JACK VALENTI (New York Times, June 24, 2005)

•HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO SELL A DIAMOND? (The Atlantic Monthly, February 1982)
(This article is 30 years old, but it’s one of the most fascinating things I have ever read — a look at how the De Beers diamond cartel used brilliant advertising, ruthless business practices, and psychology to create the “diamond invention” and basically brainwash people into believing that a bunch a shiny rocks represented love and created a “tradition” by preying on materialism: Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public’s hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world’s mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.)

•CONFESSIONS OF A COLLEGE BASKETBALL BENCHWARMER (The Atlantic, Mar. 6, 2012)

•NO, THE MOON DID NOT SINK THE TITANIC (The Atlantic, Mar. 12, 2012)

•DARK PORTRAIT OF A ‘PAINTER OF LIGHT’ (The Los Angeles Times, Mar. 5, 2006)

•HAS MITT ROMNEY RUN A LOUSY CAMPAIGN? (The Atlantic, Mar. 15, 2012)

•HOW THE NCAA BASKETBALL CARTEL SEIZED ITS POWER (The Atlantic, Mar. 16, 2012)

•BASKETBALL PLAYERS OF THE NCAA, UNITE!: WHY STUDENT-ATHLETES SHOULD GO ON STRIKE DURING MARCH MADNESS (The Atlantic, Mar. 14, 2012)

•GEORGE EDWARDS AND THE POWERLESS PRESIDENTIAL BULLY PULPIT (The New Yorker, Mar. 19, 2012)

•SECOND COMING OF OSCAR (Bay Area Reporter, Mar. 1, 2012)

•TO THE LAST DROP (Al Jazeera, Mar. 8, 2012)

•RIVER DEEP MOUNTAIN HIGH (The Caravan, Dec. 1, 2010)

•BEIJING’S UNDERGROUND CITY: A JOURNEY INTO THE VAST SUBTERRANEAN SYSTEM OF TUNNELS MEANT TO PROTECT MILLIONS DURING A SOVIET NUCLEAR ATTACK (The Caravan, July 1, 2011)

•CASE OFFERS LOOK INTO DRUG RING INVOLVING ‘SNOOP’ FROM “THE WIRE” (Baltimore Sun, Mar. 5, 2012)