"The Next Time You Listen to Some of Your Favorite Groups from the ’60s, Please Don’t Be Upset"

"The Wrecking Crew was not supposed to attract attention. Groups like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Monkees and many others didn’t care to point out why they sounded so much better on records than on the road. But Wrecking Crew members could work miracles, like the time when, with only three minutes’ worth of studio time allotted them, they played a first-take, no-glitch version of 'The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.' As Roy Halee, Simon and Garfunkel’s engineer and co-producer, once said of a top Wrecking Crew bassist: 'You never have to stop the tape because of a mistake by Joe Osborn. There just aren’t any.'"

Janet Maslin in The New York Times reviews Kent Hartman's The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret.

Newark with Palm Trees

"'Weegee linked these distortions to a medium that was tied to the truth,' Wallis said, 'and he linked the distortions to the distortion of celebrity itself, in which the celebrities distorted reality with acting, the look of their bodies and their personas.' Marilyn Monroe's face, her biological logo, is twisted like a Francis Bacon painting, or a funhouse mirror under Weegee's mischievous manipulations. Lucile Ball becomes a Coney Island caricaturist's bad day. Slaughtering sacred cows was his business, and in Hollywood the abattoir was full."

Drew Tewksbury in the LA Weekly reviews the exhibit "Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles" at MOCA.

"Losers who Win"

"'I had this vague idea of invading pop culture,' Oregon native Groening said of his early days in Los Angeles, which he chose over New York as the warmer, drier place to live in poverty while planning that coup. 'I remember hanging out, just down this street, in Astro Burger with [artist friends] Gary Panter and Byron Werner and scheming how to do it. Gary had written an art manifesto about it and Byron said, no, that we were sell outs, as we split a burger three ways.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert Lloyd talks with Matt Groening on occasion of the 500th episode of The Simpsons.

"But Why Do Regions that Rely on the Safety Net Elect Politicians who Want to Tear It Down?"

"The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda."

Paul Krugman answers the above question in The New York Times.

"New Breeding Program Aimed At Keeping Moderate Republicans From Going Extinct"

"Though hopes for the captive breeding program remain high, many leading political conservationists note the number of optimal habitats for moderate, freethinking Republicans across the country has shrunk drastically, with studies showing the species may never again be able to recover in areas where it has been totally eradicated, such as the South and the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives."

From The Onion.

Vested Interest

"You may notice a wide range here—the sweater vest has been proudly adopted by jocks, rich guys, guys who want to seem friendlier, and cool young men. Indeed, at first glance, the sweater vest seems riddled with contradiction. It lies at the intersection of practicality (it provides warmth to the core while leaving the arms unencumbered ) and frivolity (it is often used purely and impractically to jazz up an otherwise staid ensemble). The look is both boyish and grandfatherly, sporty and fusty, conservative and eccentric, old-fashioned and hip. These conflicting connotations emerge even more clearly when you look at the ways the sweater vest has been mobilized by various costume designers over the years: On Chandler Bing, the vest informs us that we’re looking at a lovable loser; on Ferris Bueller it reads as retro with a touch of punk; on Dirty Harry, the vest says rogue; on Steve Urkel it says nerd; worn with short sleeves and bulging biceps, the vest helps make Brad Pitt into a tough guy; the argyle version worn with Dockers tells us that Michael Bluth is a total square."

Inspired by Rick Santorum, Julia Felsenthal in Slate explores the sartorial meaning of the sweater vest.

"An Important Book Less Because of What It Says than Because of What It Omits"

"Murray nostalgically regrets the lost America of his 1950s Midwestern boyhood. But to describe in any true way how that America was lost would require a reckoning of how that America was made. Unwilling, as he acknowledges, to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence, Murray prefers to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics."

David Frum at The Daily Beast writes an epic review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman joins in on the criticism of Murray.

"Family Unsure What To Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions"

"'I just can't believe how much stuff Kent collected over the years,' said Lowery Tuesday. 'There's a poster for some movie called Urgh!, stacks of empty Quisp cereal boxes, at least five old lamps that don't work, and a slew of little plastic toys. Obviously, all these things meant something to Kent— but what? And why?'"

From The Onion, 2003.

Styles for 1912

"The exciting portion of the 2012 primary season may be winding down, but one hundred years ago one of the most dramatic elections in American history was just getting underway. Which made us wonder: what would it be like to cover the 1912 race the same way we cover the current contest? An experiment then: blogging the 1912 election."

Gabriel Snyder at The Atlantic Wire introduces the 1912 Project.

"Neither a Man nor a Crowd nor a Nation Can Be Trusted to Act Humanely or to Think Sanely under the Influence of a Great Fear"

"Like Father Coughlin, Billie James Hargis, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and so many other right wing media crusaders before them, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham understand that for many religious Americans, 'evil' is not just an adjective but also a noun. When the Puritans first arrived in New England, they believed they were reclaiming a wilderness from Satan. Many traditionalists on the right, whether Christian Millennialists or not, feel much the same way.
"To them, Godless Communism or Secular Humanism isn't the absence of a religious orientation so much as they are Satanic religions in and of themselves, whose acolytes glorify evil, promote the slaughter of innocent, unborn babies, and persecute believing Christians. Blue State America is Rome in the time of Christ. Whether its depravity is manifested in the form of sexual libertinage, income redistribution, spiritual or economic incontinence, blasphemy, women's and gay rights, or the threat of 'race mixing,' anathema and even violence are completely appropriate responses to it."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.

"Something of His Subject’s Spirit"

"Three years before he entered Gardner’s studio, Lincoln termed the United States, in one of his early messages to Congress, 'the last best hope of earth.' Considering that our fragile Union was not 100 years old and stood a good chance of dissolving, it was an improbable thing to say. But Lincoln saw beyond the bloodshed and division. He saw us not only as we were, but as we might be. And he calls on us through the ages to commit ourselves to the unfinished work he so nobly advanced—the work of perfecting our Union."

President Obama discusses an 1865 photograph of Abraham Lincoln in The Atlantic's special issue on the Civil War.

"Healthcare Reform's Best—and Last—Shot"

"Criticism of the Obama administration gained momentum through 2009, and even became strangely vogue among economists and columnists who were widely thought to be on the president’s side. It was in this context that voices who had lionized Obama—from seasoned pragmatists like Robert Reich (who blurbs Starr’s book) to MoveOn.org—spoke of the 'public option' as the holy grail, and of Obama as its perfidious guardian. Perhaps it was the magical word 'public,' or the vague sense that Obama, having worked to salvage banks and restructure the car companies, was now protecting the profits of insurance companies. Perhaps it was the way this insinuation was magnified by the charge that the members of Obama’s economic team were mostly disciples of Robert Rubin, thus to blame for deregulating investment banking and causing the financial crisis in the first place. Perhaps it was the way Obama’s half-heartedness about a public plan, which he knew the Senate would never give him, suggested timidity. In any case, Obama’s left critics now lambasted him. Former DNC chair Howard Dean declared in November 2009 that without the public option 'this bill is worthless and should be defeated'—not grounds for drug testing, perhaps, but possibly for prescribing some Xanax."

Bernard Avishai in The Nation reviews Paul Starr's Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform.

"Forced to Choose Between God and Man, Choose Women"

"According to Walsh, religious freedom is reserved for 'anybody but Catholics.' Nonsense. Are Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pacifists exempt from taxes that pay for war and weapons? Can Scientologists, who abhor psychiatry, deduct the costs of the National Institute of Mental Health? As an atheist, a feminist, a progressive, I ante up for so much stuff that violates my conscience, the government should probably pay me damages. Why should the bishops be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society? Walsh cites the Amish, who are exempt from buying health insurance because they have a conscientious objection to it, but the Amish are a self-isolated band of would-be nineteenth-century farmers; they don’t try to make others read by kerosene lamps or demand the government subsidize their buggies. The Catholic church, by contrast, runs institutions that employ, teach and care for millions of people, for which it gets oceans of public money. A great many of those employed and served aren’t even Catholic: at Jesuit universities, almost half the students aren’t in the church; at Notre Dame, almost half the faculty is non-Catholic, and that is not unusual."

Katha Pollitt in The Nation defends the Obama adminstration's contraception decision.

And Joan Walsh in Salon says that Catholics should support Obama and preach what they practice.

In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan argues that Obama has won the debate.