Just in time for the election yesterday, David Kipen went on The Madeleine Brand show on KPCC with a list of what he though would be good required reading for the new California Governor. His list included theory, biography and classics of political writing – and some fiction. Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, All the King’s [...]
n an article about the growing trend of private takeovers of public library systems, David Streitfeld of the New York Times poses the question:
Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then? [...]
Joshua Furst grapples with the human condition by creating characters on the edge. They inhabit the fringes of society, sanity and cultural norms, but remain incredibly grounded in a common American experience, with all its oddball rituals and quirks. In his conversation with Lee Thomas, he defends the merits of dissent, even when the dissidents self-destruct: “To dismiss them out of hand for those bad choices becomes, I think, in our public conversation, a way of dismissing the truth behind those choices.”
One year after President Obama’s inauguration, everyone seems to have either criticism or advice for his administration–for pushing health care reform; for not yet passing health care reform; for not waving his magic wand to fix the economy, eradicate H1N1, and end both wars; for not leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But [...]
Few places are more evocative of mystery and the exotic than Casablanca. And anyone who has ever imagined its fragrances or color will recognize the setting of Laila Lalami’s second novel. But those who imagine Casablanca merely as a city of romance and North African charm may find themselves at a loss to reconcile the spices of their imagination with the brutal realities of poverty and the political and religious corruption Lalami portrays in Secret Son (Algonquin Books, April 2009).
Lee Thomas talks to debut novelist Jeffrey Rotter about the social risks of homemade clothing, museums as metaphors, the parallels between As I Lay Dying and reality T.V., and the ways in which imagination can change the world – for good and evil. The title of Rotter’s novel, The Unknown Knowns, alludes to that Donald Rumsfeld speech of linguistic loop-de-loops that would have driven George Orwell crazy; the book, which looks askance at our modern take on “Us vs. Them,” tackles the ontological questions presented by our vague and shadowy paranoia, but ups the ante considerably beyond the present moment in history to the personal crises that drive all good stories.
Politico.com is calling Obama “the next Oprah.” The president’s widely circulated summer reading list seems to have given every book on it a huge bump in sales, as indicated by these Amazon rankings (stats are via Politico) BEFORE = on Monday, before Obama’s list was released / AFTER = as of Wednesday):
- The Way Home [...]
This nearly week-old David Brooks op-ed is infuriating for many reasons (such as its writer’s blatant scoffing at and outright denial of–despite the current economic disaster–the notion that to run a truly successful company or country, a leader should have the prescience to realize that the world around him or her is always changing, the [...]
We knew Palin could recite fiction. Now Slate’s Hart Seely adds line breaks to give us the poetry of Sarah Palin; among her works are “Befoulers of the Verbiage,” “Small Mayors,” and a haiku.
Also on Slate, Kitty Burns Florey attempts to diagram the candidate’s sentences.
“…The more the diagram is forced to wander around the [...]
