Elvis

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On Elvis’s truck route was the Sun Recording Company, a small outfit run by a genial man named Sam Phillips. Phillips’s dream was one day to put his name on a map by getting something “new in a sound.”

Among other studio services performed by Sun Recording was a gimmick that offered the public a chance to “cut your own disc.” For four dollars anyone could come in and record a birthday message, an anniversary song or anything he or she wanted.

One Saturday afternoon, Elvis wandered into Sun Recording carrying his guitar over his shoulder [looking to record a couple of songs for his mother]. On that particular afternoon, office manager, Marion Keisker, was running the office. Miss Keisker, an enthusiastic woman who was always on the lookout to give new talent a helping hand, was a former “Miss Radio Memphis.” If Marion Keisker had not been on duty that Saturday afternoon in 1954, Elvis Presley might still be a truck driver today.

-- “Elvis: What Happened?” by Steve Dunleavy

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Sam Phillips is credited for being the man to get Elvis started in music and helping Elvis to tease out his distinctive style, essentially bringing black sound and rhythm into the white side of town, but someone had to get Phillips’s attention, and that credit goes to Marion Keisker.

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George Orwell

We have a tribute to Orwell. When our country starts to look a little scary, it is a common thing to revisit our foremost anti-totalitarian thinker.

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When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.

-- William Giraldi, "Orwell: Sage of the Century" in The New Republic

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The Arab Spring, the Arab Nightmare

“The Arab Spring is the canary in the mine shaft for a broader problem — fragmented countries, too much population growth, terrible education systems, too little water — these countries are the losers.”

-- Joshua M. Landis, director of Center of Middle East Studies at University of Oklahoma

As you could have predicted, the overthrow of the Islamist backed Morsi government in Egypt has not led to the great liberal republic that one might have hoped for. The violence on the street is as great as ever. And, of course, this also goes for the other troubled regimes of the region, such as Syria and Libya. The region continues to look like a black hole for hope and progress.

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Daily Fun

The African elephant bull “Schaka" tries to pick some leaves from the crown of a tree in the zoo in Duisburg, western Germany on July 23, 2013. AFP PHOTO / DPA / FEDERICO GAMBARINI via The Daily Beast

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