“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.