Isak

Today in Startling News ...

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the number of journalists killed around the world for their work in 2009 rose to a record high in 2009. A massacre in the Philippines of more than 30 media workers pushed the total to 68 deaths -- a sixty percent increase over over the 42 deaths last year. The previous record high of 67 was tallied in 2007 (during the height of Iraq fatalities). All but two of this year's deaths weren't foreign correspondents, but rather local reporters. Print journalists were 56 percent of the total deaths in 2009, "indicating that print media continue to play a front-line role in reporting the news in dangerous situations," according to CPR. It adds: "Although CPJ research has found a notable decline in the number of print journalists in jail, it has charted no comparable drop in fatalities among print reporters, editors, and photographers."

The deadliest countries this year for those who are on the ground, seeking accountability and sense in a world on fire are:

1. Philippines (32)
2. Somalia (9)
3. Pakistan (4)
4. Iraq (4)
5. Russia (3)
6. Mexico (2)
7. Sri Lanka (2)

Twelve other countries saw at least one journalist murdered this year. The four deaths in Iraq represent the fewest since the war began in 2003. About 20 deaths in 2009 are still being investigated; CPJ will announce the final mortal tally in January of those who, it confirms, were murdered for their work as journalists.

Seriously, people: thank a journalist today.

Choose Books:The Top Ten Magazine Gift Subscriptions

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

The Top Ten Magazine Gift Subscriptions

This year, consider giving the gift of ideas. When you offer a gift subscription to an outstanding magazine, you aren't just sending a source of delight to the recipient's mailbox throughout the next year. You are also delivering the opportunity to participate in the public conversation, to catalyze the imagination, and to tap into new ways of thinking. At the same time, you get the chance to disseminate favorite periodicals into the world, strengthening support for the brightest lights on the newsstand. It is one of my favorite items to give. There are literally hundreds of excellent opportunities for magazines as gifts; here is what you need to know about ten of them.

1. The Sun

Tagline: Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-Free.

Details: 12 issues/year. Founded in 1974 and remains an independent nonprofit publication. Publishes essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, photography, "The Dog-Eared Page," and its famous "Readers Write" section.

Recent articles:  "Who Will Heal the Healers? Pamela Wible on What's Missing from Healthcare Reform"; "Eighteen Attempts at Writing About a Miscarriage"; "Selected Poems: Tony Hoagland"; "Readers Write: Selling Out"; "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered"; "Spring Comes to New Jersey."

Gift Subscriptions: First one-year subscription is $36; each additional gift is $25 (30% off the regular price). Each recipient gets a card announcing the gift. If you are already a subscriber and renew now, all gift subscriptions are 30% off.

Trademarks: No ads in any issue; the magazine depends on subscription support. Beautifully designed, and features outstanding writing animated by hope. As it describes itself, The Sun uses "words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human."

Consider this as a gift for: Idealists. People who are fed up with a culture of soundbites and summary, who long for expansive perspectives. Artists.

See the other nine spotlighted gift subscriptions after the jump.

Choose Books: War Talk

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

War Talk
By Arundhati Roy

Sure, you remember Arundhati Roy for her splendid 1997 debut novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker prize and a whole lot of deserved international attention.

It's the only piece of fiction that Roy has published.

Since The God of Small Things, Roy has embraced the form of the essay. She's published quite a lot of collections, almost entirely with independent publishers. War Talk is one of them. In a series of plainspoken essays, Roy examines the ideas of "democracy and dissent, racism and empire, and war and peace," as South End Press describes it. First published in 2003 and drawn from her Lannan Foundation lecture on the first anniversary of 9/11, Roy's essays pay special attention to the United States wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the recent announcement of a series escalation of troops, Roy's examination of militarism is hardly dated.

War Talk turns expansive in its look at the rise of religious and racial violence, frightening government tactics against Muslims in India, and nuclear aggression between India and Pakistan. At its base, the book questions what it means to be a nation, to be part of an ethnic group, to be a writer, or an activist.

Roy writes in the title essay:

The last question every visiting journalist always asks me is: Are you writing another book? That question mocks me. Another book? Right now? This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature, and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?

What might be onerously heavy material is, in Roy's hand, accessible and clear, first-person and honest. War Talk benefits from concise writing in simple language; its origins as a speech intended to be delivered out loud are apparent. Also apparent: Roy's passion and conscience, which gives every page energy. This is an eloquent collection from the writer who was jailed in India after she refused to comply with attempts to silence her criticism of the government.

Essays include:

• "Ahimsa"
• "Come September"
• "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky"
• "Confronting Empire"

This book was a finalist for the 2004 Independent Publisher Awards in Essay/Creative Nonfiction.

Consider this book as a gift for people who are one or more of the following:

• People who made anxious comments after the announcement of the recent escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
• The folks who carpooled with you to anti-war protests.
• People who send you links to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech, or of Dwight Eisenhower calling out the military industrial complex in his farewell speech.
• People who loved The God of Small Things.
• People who care about war and violence, but perhaps feel like they don't have the "facts" to support their opinions. That is, the folks who say, "I don't know enough" when Iraq comes up-- and are intimidated to read large academic tomes on the subject.

Recommended Edition:

South End Press
Paperback / $12.00

A slim, attractive paperback, War Talk is 154 pages. For a more hefty gift, perhaps for the person you know who is especially a fan of Arundhati Roy, you might consider giving the cloth edition of the book -- though it's much pricier, probably because it's intended for libraries.

Where To Buy:

Your local independent bookseller. Find the shop nearest to you here. You might also want to prowl the used bookshops for treasures. If the book you want is not in stock, the bookseller will be happy to order it for you (almost always sans shipping); just ask! If there are really, truly no indie booksellers near you, consider ordering online from an independent bookseller, such as Brookline Booksmith or Powell's, and having it delivered to your doorstep. Another option: order online directly from the publisher.

Image Credit: Creative Commons, by John Loo.

Choose Books: Lies My Teacher Told Me

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
By James Loewen

Be ready: This one is a socks knocker-offer.

This provocative book zooms in on eighteen of the leading high school American history textbooks and discovers exactly how much dull misinformation and empty-headed storytelling that we require young citizens to rotely learn. What's missing from the standard history we expect of the people who will be voting and leading our nation? Nearly all ambiguity, passion, conflict, questioning, and drama from our past (to paraphrase from the book's publisher).

A true passion for history comes to the fore in Lies My Teacher Told Me, as it compares historical myths of America's origins--from Christopher Columbus to the Pilgrims, Abraham Lincoln to Vietnam--with an honest and vibrant account of our past that is grounded in truth. Chapters include:

• Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making
• "Gone With the Wind": The Invisibility of Racism in American History Textbooks
• Watching Big Brother: What Textbooks Teach About the Federal Government
• Down the Memory Hole: The Disappearance of the Recent Past
• Progress Is Our Most Important Product
  

This book is a persuasive call for clarity in our foggy contemporary time; a lively and powerful handbook for anyone who thinks that what happened in our nation--and what is happening--matters. Because of this, and because of Loewen's dynamic writing, this book is the sort that becomes an underground favorite, passed from hand to hand, the spark for a thousand conversations. For my part, I couldn't get the book out of my mind. It inspired an article I wrote where I compared how history was taught in three high schools with very different demographics--an experience that brought the book to life and underlined how much is at stake.

Lies My Teacher Told Me won both the American Book Award and the Oliver C. Cox Anti-Racism Award, that last of which is given by the American Sociological Association.

Consider this book as a gift for people who are one or more of the following:

• People who are in any way connected with the education world, be they teachers, students, advocates, school board members, regents, policymakers, or, hell, even coaches.
• People who dug A People’s History of the United States—or would dig it, if they read it, but are perhaps put off by the heft of Howard Zinn’s book.
• The ones who you catch watching The History Channel, or "Roots," or "Band of Brothers."
• Activists, and others engaged with politics--from get-out-the-vote types, to government employees and military servicemembers, to elected officials.

Recommended Edition:

Touchstone
Paperback / $16.00

This trade paperback edition is the 2007 re-issue of the original 1995 book. It is 464 pages and contains updated material and revisions that look at the George W. Bush administration, the Iraq War, and 9/11.

Where To Buy:

Your local independent bookseller. Find the shop nearest to you here. You might also want to prowl the used bookshops for treasures. If the book you want is not in stock, the bookseller will be happy to order it for you (almost always sans shipping); just ask! If there are really, truly no indie booksellers near you, consider ordering online from an independent bookseller, such as Brookline Booksmith or Powell's, and having it delivered to your doorstep. Another option: order online directly from the publisher.

Image Credit: Creative Commons, by Boris SV.

Choose Books: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
By Adrienne Rich

Poet and provocateur, Adrienne Rich is one of the most original minds of both literature and activism. She has published no less than twenty-four collections of poetry, alongside many volumes of nonfiction and essays. In What Is Found There, Rich brings her many identities together with both verve and passion. What is the purpose of poetry in a world where there is so much suffering? How can social responsibility and art co-exist? How is it even possible to have something like "artistic integrity" when, as W.H. Auden once put it, "poetry does nothing?"

What Is Found There is a hybrid book, at once a set of deeply-felt journals; sharp-sighted essays that take close readings of poets like Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens; and something like an anthology--poems that both well-known and under-known are given space. As well, Rich draws in threads from visual art and the natural world.

The New York Times Book Review indicated that "this is a book of wisdom...more resonant with each rereading.” The Boston Globe called it, “Essential reading for ... anyone interested in the current debates on art and politics...and the spiritual and moral power of literature.” But June Jordan put it best:

The clear-eyed depth and the visionary stretch of these notes bespeak an irresistible, prophetic intelligence and a huge heart wrestling with the transformative power of poetry up against the needs of an emerging new world.

Who knows how long it would take me to find my way to Rich's book if it hadn't been for sale at an end-of-business sale? The only good thing about such sad sales is that it inspires readerly whims. This was one of mine. And now, it is a book that I will never be "done" reading. I want to put a copy in the hand of everyone I know. 

This is a powerful book, and a joy to read.

Consider this book as a gift for people who are one or more of the following:

• People who struggle to balance their individual acts of creativity with a broader sense of social responsibility.
• Politically-minded folks who might be ready for more nuance (I'm thinking of an activist friend who told me that she only reads nonfiction now because her reading attention is inevitably limited and she feels compelled to give it to 'true stories' so she can better understand what's going on in the world. Rich's book could be something of a gateway drug for her, so that she can better see the expansive truth that can only be conveyed through fiction and poetry.)
• Bookworms with a generous heart.
  

Recommended Edition:

 W.W. Norton
Paperback / $14.95

Definitely look for this 2003 "expanded edition" of the book (which was originally published ten years before): it features a new preface and a new essay, "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture," that Rich wrote after September 11, 2001. Taken in the prism of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rich's book takes another shade of resonance.

Not to judge by it or anything, but it also has a much nicer cover than the original.

Where To Buy:

Your local independent bookseller. Find the shop nearest to you here. You might also want to prowl the used bookshops for treasures. If the book you want is not in stock, the bookseller will be happy to order it for you (almost always sans shipping); just ask! If there are really, truly no indie booksellers near you, consider ordering online from an independent bookseller, such as Brookline Booksmith or Powell's, and having it delivered to your doorstep. Another option: order online directly from the publisher.

Image Credit: Creative Commons, by db*photography.

Damn. Damn. Damn, damn!

Bill Moyers has announced that as of April 2010, he's leaving weekly television and retiring his outstanding PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal. I can't begrudge him the desire for some free time--he's 75 years old--but he's one of my most beloved heroes. (I have been known to call him the love of my life.) The show features passionate and thoughtful long conversations with fascinating people; Bill beams a contagious curiosity. And he has not shied away from speaking truth to power, as they say, with his bold, scathing call-outs of government abuse and media ridiculousness, particularly in the build-up to the Iraq war. "Tell the truth," he exclaims in a keynote talk about media justice (one of the best keynotes ever.... really).

I feel the void already.

And, oh wait, it gets worse. NOW on PBS has been canceled. One of the best venues for television investigation journalism, hosted by the affable David Brancaccio and featuring the sharp reporting of Maria Hinojosa, I have been a regular viewer of the weekly show (thanks to their website). No surprise, Bill Moyers originally hosted the show, which perhaps set the insightful, courageous tone. There are few venues anywhere in the media for such thoughtful news.

With NOW, I will hold a grudge. Why, PBS, why? To quote my favorite movie scientist, albeit in vastly different circumstances, "Damn. .... Damn. .... Damn, damn!"

A Literature Emerges

Brought up on a forced diet of Shakespeare and Dickens, they plotted to throw the ‘English Department’ out of universities in Africa and replace it with African literature; a challenge to the “fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature”. In 1962, the mass of what we now call African literature had not been written yet. So, June 1962 on Makerere Hill was also a mission statement. The next two decades would see a great number of novels, poems, essays and plays written. ...

The defining character of African literature, one from which problems of reading it emerge, is that a handful of writers and editors wilfully created a body of work that had not existed before. Compression and extensions of pasts and histories was inevitable, assumptions that would only become apparent with time went to press. In time, Song of Lawino, The Trials of Brother Jero and The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born appeared; the writing was done and the reading started in earnest. ...

The theoretic reader’s bone of contention is that African literature was largely made to a cultural-nationalist order, however unconsciously (which can be said of any work); to use imagery of the 60s, the African Writers Series (AWS) was a cultural Apollo Project, a literary 5-year Plan.

There's a fascinating article by David Kaiza at Kwani? on "Mis-appreciation of African Literature (101)." Do check it out.

America Finally Perks Up to Mahmoud Darwish

If anyone doubted that a contemporary poet could be both a celebrity and a literary critic's darling, then I offer Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, as Exhibit A. As the Wall Street Journal describes, Darwish packed stadiums--stadiums, people. Among many other awards, he won the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (from France) and the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom. Tens of thousands crowded together for Darwish funeral last year.

It's perhaps no surprise that indie publishers in the U.S. were the first to catch on to Darwish, and to publish English translations of his work... Archipelago Books in particular, as well as Verso Books and Copper Canyon Press. But just last month, the first major American publisher stepped up. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux released If I Were Another, a book of long poems written between 1990 and 2005 by Darwish that is translated by Fady Joudah.

From the WSJ article:

These “lyric epics,” drawn from four collections, weave together many settings and voices. An elegy for the author’s father is followed by a polyvocal poem spoken by birds; a series on Andalusia, by the monologue of a Native American.

Publisher's Weekly thinks that this book is pretty awesome:

These works follow Darwish’s poetic development from a historically focused middle period to the devastatingly personal lyric-epic of his late style. Formally varied—Rubaiyats alternate with sprawling free-form poems, in which prose paragraphs meet both long and short verse lines—Darwish’s Sufi-inspired poetry probes, admires, describes, longs for and questions. His subjects are often broad: the inheritance and disinheritance of lands, languages and histories. Sometimes, though, he turns to concrete need, confessing, for example, in ‘Mural,’ his book-length poem about a brush with death: ‘I want to walk to the bathroom/ on my own.’ But Darwish’s poems are at their most singular and powerful when he collapses the boundaries between great and small concerns, as when he articulates, ‘Wars teach us to love detail: the shape of our door keys,/ how to comb our wheat with eyelashes and walk lightly on our land.’ The stakes of this work—for Darwish and for his readers—are clear: ‘O my language,/ help me to adapt and embrace the universe.’”

Choose Books: The Lost Massey Lectures

Why Choose Books for your gifts this holiday season? Glad you asked. It's because there are few things more fun than giving someone a book they fall in love with; it lasts longer and matters more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely being more than about fifteen dollars. What's more, your purposeful choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture in a time when the book world is struggling and even literacy is horrifically low. Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful.

In this series, you can look forward an ongoing guide to books as gifts; at the end of the season, it will be collected as an attractive PDF for you to download. More than a mere list of my personal favorites, Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of very different styles for very different tastes (and ages). Learn more about this series here. 

The Lost Massey Lectures: Recovered Classics from Five Great Thinkers
Edited by Bernie Lucht

There is a wonderful Canadian cultural tradition, and it's called the Massey Lectures. CBC broadcasts an iconic and much-anticipated public lecture series that is described as a "feast of ideas." Each year, one of the brightest minds of our time is invited to give a series of broadcast lectures on a topic of their choosing--and the results are provoking, innovative and inspiring. This is a tradition that Canada has kept since the 1960s and, over time, many of the best lectures have been "lost"--that is, unavailable in any form to the public.

Here comes this collection to remedy that. The Lost Massey Lectures features Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking about creative nonviolence and oppression in "Conscience for Change;" John Kenneth Galbraith on economics and poverty; Jane Jacobs on Canadian cities and Quebec separatism; Paul Goodman on the moral ambiguity of America; and Eric W. Kierans on globalism and the nation-state. These lectures are not dense--remember, they were read aloud on national radio--but they are intellectual beasts, written with passion and care.

You can mine other outstanding Massey Lectures--including Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Noam Chomsky's Necessary Illusions, and Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose To Live Inside--here and here.

As a whole, it seems to me that The Lost Massey Lectures are to ideas what The Paris Review Interviews are to writing. This is a book to treasure. Or to give to someone else so they can treasure it.

Consider this book as a gift for people who are one or more of the following:

• The folks who lure you into conversations of big ideas, like God, government, the purpose of existence, morality, and so forth.
• People who are frustrated with soundbite culture and thinkers who stay "on message" at the expense of nuance.
• People who subscribe to The Walrus.
• Canadians. Naturally.

Recommended Edition:

House of Anansi
$24.95 / $18.95

While this is pricier than traditional paperbacks, this is both a substantial and beautiful edition of the book. I have seen the price vary at indie booksellers; there might be some issue with the original Canadian cost varying in American bookshops. I got my own copy for $18.95 in Ann Arbor. This edition includes an introduction by Bernie Lucht, the veteran CBC producer who has been the man behind the Massey Lectures since 1984.

Other Available Editions:

More Lost Massey Lectures
House of Anansi
$18.95

You might consider a gift that pairs this book with its companion. This edition features Nobel Peace Prize recipient Willy Brandt on the dangerous inequities between developing and industrialized nations; George Grant on the worsening predicament of the West through an examination of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche; Claude Lévi-Strauss on the nature and role of myth in human history; Frank Underhill on the deficiencies of the Canadian constitution; and Barbara Ward, in the very first Massey Lecture, on the origin and predicament of underdeveloped countries in The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations.

Where To Buy:

Your local independent bookseller. Find the shop nearest to you here. You might also want to prowl the used bookshops for treasures. If the book you want is not in stock, the bookseller will be happy to order it for you (almost always sans shipping); just ask! If there are really, truly no indie booksellers near you, consider ordering online from an independent bookseller, such as Brookline Booksmith or Powell's, and having it delivered to your doorstep. Another option: order online directly from the publisher.

Image Credit: Creative Commons, by jsome1.

Theater of War

Sophocles has been drafted for duty.

The Pentagon is, amazingly, offering millions of dollars to Theater of War, an independent production company, to perform readings of Ajax and Philoctetes for service members at 50 military sites. The tour, where myth meets the military, will go on through at least next summer. More than just entertainment, the program is intended to offer art with a nuanced perspective on "the psychic effect of war" to those who might be most hungry for it. It seems that the program also offers a post-reading open discussion, facilitated by military personnel and therapists.

The plays were written 2,500 years ago by a writer who himself served as a general in war-torn Athens, and they bear weight today.

From The New York Times:

The scenes from “Ajax” show the title character plotting to murder Greek generals who have disgraced him. Under a trance by the goddess Athena, he ends up slaughtering farm animals he thinks are the officers. Ajax’s concubine is depicted as trying to bring him to his senses; the final scene shows Ajax in agony, committing suicide.

The “Philoctetes” segment portrays Greek military leaders plotting to trick the hero into leading an attack on Troy, and shows Philoctetes struggling with both physical and emotional pain.

A special performance was held on Monday night for dozens of service members, veterans, relatives and Pentagon officials at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. The actors in the one-hour reading were David Strathairn, Jeffrey Wright, Gloria Reuben and Adam Driver, a former Marine.

The investigation of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 at Fort Hood in Texas, loomed over the reading, though it was mentioned only a few times during the post-performance discussion. Still, there were echoes of Fort Hood, especially in the story of Ajax — in the pain that soldiers and their loved ones faced then and now, and in the questions raised by the play about whether war can drive warriors to acts of evil.

It is particularly interesting that the founder of Theater of War emphasizes that "the performances were not psychotherapy ... "

He described the effort as a public health project to help service members and relatives overcome stigmas about psychological injuries by showing that some of the bravest heroes suffered mentally from battle.

Thanks to Chris M. for the tip.