December 11, 2006 | The Nation

Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.

As the Democratic majority in Congress weighs several measures to
address voter suppression, the time is right for real voting reform on
the local level.

America's environmentalists won big in the midterm elections. But can
they make real progress on climate change by 2008 and beyond?

Ten years after its passage, California's Prop 209
has had a devastating impact on diversity in higher education.

Milton Friedman's free-market faith produced a bastardized system of
interest-group politics that favors sectors of citizens at the expense
of many others.

Modesty is a virtue, but rather than telling the courts to
practice restraint, the Bush Administration should rein in its own
abuses of power.

James Carville's bizarre attack on Howard Dean exposed an explosive
battle for control between Clintonistas-in-waiting and advocates of
renewal. This is a good fight to have.

Bush launched the Iraq disaster, and it keeps coming back and hitting us in the head. And now he is counting on Iran to help bail us out.

As US Air seeks to create a mega-airline by gobbling up Delta, the
evidence mounts that a free market in the sky just doesn't work.

Mainstream media have transformed the permanent presidential campaign
into a never-ending soap opera. Progressives must create the
movements that will influence whoever decides to run.

Bush's contempt for the truth and for those whose job it is to find it
has created an existential crisis for mainstream media.

Can you say "never"?

"For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am a soldier in the Army
Special Forces, just back from Iraq, where I lived and fought beside my
Iraqi counterpart as we battled the insurgency. I am a conflicted man."

It's the end of the world as we know it: Tower Records, the last great CD emporium, is
closing, victim of the iPod and MP3 revolution. As Wal-Mart and
other big-box stores pick up the slack, will niche music also perish?

Victoria Glendinning's biography of Leonard Woolf looks at a remarkable
public intellectual whose life and work were eclipsed by his more famous
spouse.

God's War explores the barbaric clash of Christianity and Islam,
and what happens when people follow religious voices that no one else
can hear.

Adam Gopnik's Through the Children's Gate details the trials of
a very smug and special class of parents raising children in
post-9/11 New York.

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford explores the contradictions
of a social revolutionary possessed of an aristocrat's sense of the
wrong and right kind of people.

Your coffin was so small,
Only I knew it was full of
candlewick bedspreads,
orange pekoe tea leaves
smoking chimneys over wet peat;

The Unfree French looks at the German occupation of Vichy; Bad Faith is a grim biography of a French collaborator.

Laura Kipnis's The Female Thing takes women to task for perpetuating the notion that they're vulnerable.

Roald Dahl's Collected Stories are best enjoyed by adult readers
who take their humor black.

Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation is a brave and
continuous affirmation of life and an assurance that though the Republic
has been betrayed, we are not to give up hope.

Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is actually four stories, each replete with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a
plaintive ukulele.

The perils of electronic voting.

Californians fail to support a progressive energy policy.

The fetus is not the issue. The woman is.

In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, state lawmakers end the highly controversial process.

"A premise like this can go on for a generation," says CNN President Jonathan Klein.