Book of the Month

Shuts and Failures

by Michael Maiello

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Personal Information

Website
http://www.dagblog.com
Biography

Michael Maiello (also known as "Destor23") is a New York based columnist, performer, fiction author and playwright. He is the author of Shuts & Failures, Rejected New Yorker Pieces (Also Rejected by McSweeney's!). He worked for ten years at Forbes Media, writing and editing for both Forbes Magazine and Forbes.com. He also appeared frequently on CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business News, CNN and MSNBC.  He is also the author of the 2004 book Buy The Rumor, Sell The Fact: 85 Wall Street Maxims and What They Really Mean. He has performed stand up comedy at The Laugh Factory, The Comic Strip and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and now reads regularly with Mama D's Arts Bordello in New York. He has had four plays published (Night of Faith and Waiting For Death by Playscripts.com; Principia and Troy! Troy! Troy! by The New York Theatre Experience/indiethieatrenow). From inception to dissolution, he wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Daily, a News Corp. publication designed for tablet computers and he is an occasional op-ed contributor to Reuters.

Favorite Quotes

"Hi, nice to meet you. I'm David Mamet.  Fuck." - David Mamet

Superpowers

Figure Four Leglock.

History

Member for
4 years 17 weeks
Blog
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Blog Posts

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Banned Words (In The Interests Of Freedom!)

by Michael Maiello 6/12/2013 - 12:02 pm   |

Just some things I don't want to see on any blogs anymore, anywhere.  These words and phrases are now banned until further notice on all of the Internet.  I will be working with my friends at the NSA to enforce this. By the way, they aren't all that prevalent at Dag.  This is just stuff irking me on the rest of the Internet.

The List

We the people...

Duly appointed officials...

Duly elected representatives (or president)...

He (She/They/It) broke his (her/their/its) oath... (I'm so sick of it).

Those who would trade freedom for security... (seriously, stop it.  In the history of mankind, this quotation has never convinced anyone of anything and everyone has heard it a zillion times.) [Read more]

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Edward Snowden: Your Technoutopian/Libertarian Hero Traitor?

by Michael Maiello 6/11/2013 - 10:24 am   |

This morning, my favorite columnist in the world, David Brooks, gave his quick take on Edward Snowden, ultimately condemning him for antisocial behavior driven by a hyper-individualistic morality formed out of his refusal to conform to various social norms (he didn't finish high school, or community college, didn't want to be friends with his neighbor, hadn't put a ring on his girlfriend, no organized religion, etc.) [Read more]

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Obama's Eyes and Ears

by Michael Maiello 6/5/2013 - 10:39 pm   |

Back in the 2008 primaries (ah, those days that no progressive blogger out for anything other than a fight really misses) I though it was a big deal that Senator Obama didn't support people's right to bring class action civil suits against telephone carriers who broke privacy laws in order to share information with security agencies. [Read more]

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I Wrote A Book! (Almost!)

by Michael Maiello 5/23/2013 - 3:43 pm   |

As we head into the long weekend, you Daggers are probably wondering what you're going to read.  Might I suggest a short and cheap solution to your entertainment needs?  It's got more action than My Dinner With Andre.  More laughs than The Deer Hunter.  More insight than the entire oeuvre of David Brooks.  It is:

That's right, it's almost a book!  It's an ebook.  A short one.  The cassingle of books! [Read more]

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Defeat The Press

by Michael Maiello 5/21/2013 - 1:50 pm   |

I don't think there's much doubt that, in terms of law enforcement we are headed down a path that will lead to the prosecution of a journalist for publishing something classified.  My guess is that the first target will not be a strictly mainstream journalist, but I could be wrong about that.  It will almost certainly be a target that doesn't have much public sympathy.  It's not going to be somebody who has revealed unmitigated wrongdoing.  The Attorney General, whoever it is that first goes down this path, will want to contend with at best, a divided public. [Read more]

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The Biggest Political Scandal Ever...

by Michael Maiello 5/15/2013 - 1:30 pm   |

...played out in the wrestling ring, years ago.

When Irwin R. Schyster (always announced as "I...R...S!")

Fought the red, white and blue blooded (but orange-skinned) Patriot!

That's all that needs to be said about this latest scandal, right?

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Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby is a Triumph (whether you like it or not)

by Michael Maiello 5/11/2013 - 9:18 am   |

Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, is a fable.  It is not a fable now, years after it was written.  Fitzgerald structured it as a fable and intended it to be read as such. Its original title was Trimalchio in West Egg.  Gatsby is based on a party-thrower created by the Greek satirist Petronius.  So, when I hear people talking about Gatsby almost as if it’s reportage on Jazz Age America, I think that they are reading the wrong book.  Fitzgerald is not Tom Wolfe or Theodore Dreiser.  In creating Gatsby, he worked in the manner of Shakespeare, taking his inspiration from ancient and timeless source material. [Read more]

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Slaughter In Syria?

by Michael Maiello 5/9/2013 - 9:00 am   |

I worry when I write about the Middle East because I have no confidence that I know what I'm talking about and probably less interest in the differences and similarities between a Shiite and an Alawite than I do in whether or not I think that Richard Foreman's latest play at New York's Public Theater was any good (it was not.)  I sometimes confuse Wahabi with the condiment for sushi.  Heck, I don't even feel bad about this -- if the sectarian issues of the Islamic world didn't intrude into my own, uninvited, I'd be fine with that. [Read more]

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The Tyranny of Breakfast In L.A. Schools

by Michael Maiello 5/8/2013 - 2:52 pm   |

At Esquire, Charles Pearce flags a National Review article wherein some person named Dennis Prager complains that free breakfasts for public school children in Los Angeles will damage the character of the city's young, who will grow up thinking that life is nothing but a bunch of government hand-outs.  Oh, and, he says, it encourages lazy parents not to feed their kids before school.

Nobody, he says, is too poor to give their child breakfast because they can go on WebMD right now and find "five breakfast ideas for $1."  I can't waste any more time with that Prager person.  Terrible. [Read more]

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Unhealthy Austerity

by Michael Maiello 4/30/2013 - 1:57 pm   |

An Oxford University economist and a Stanford University epidemiologist have combined their considerable breadth and knowledge to conclude the Great Recession and accompanying austerity have caused 10,000 suicides and a million diagnoses of depression in the U.S. and Europe.  If you find that hard to stomach, here's something more concrete -- AIDS is once again a full blown epidemic in Greece where budgets have been cut from HIV-prevention programs. [Read more]

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