Post-Adulthood

"A human-resources executive told me recently that there’s a golden rule of HR: To motivate a baby boomer, offer him a bonus. To motivate a Generation-Xer, offer him a day off. The Grup, I think, would go for the day off, too. If the boomer’s icon of success was an empire-building maverick magnate like Ted Turner, the Grup’s model would be Spike Jonze, the 36-year-old Jackass-producing, skateboarding, awesome-indie-movie-directing free agent. Remember, the Grup of today is the slacker from 1990 who, fresh out of college, ran smack into the recession and maybe fiddled around with a riot-grrl band, then got a job at 25 for a Web-development company where she wore jeans to work and played Ping-Pong and stayed late and covered her desk in rare Japanese action figures. Now that woman is 35, a VP at a viral-marketing firm, still dressing down because everyone knows that the youth market is where it’s at, yet is scared to death she’s going to ossify into the same kind of corporate stooge she swore she’d never become. For a Grup, success isn’t about how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk, or boogie-board, away."

Adam Sternbergh in New York identifies the emergence of the new American adult: the Yupster, the Yindie, the Grup.

Artifactual History

"Some preservationists contend the collection should be used in a re-creation of the pantry at the school. Some historians want the artifacts given to a museum or library for permanent safekeeping. The Kennedy family wants all of them destroyed and kept out of the hands of ghoulish collectors."

The Los Angeles Times reports on the disagreement about what to do with kitchen contents from the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel, site of the 1968 shooting of Robert F. Kennedy.

Buck Owens, 1929-2006

Reuters reports the death of the pioneer of the "Bakersfield sound."

This Side of Paradise

"Decades of housing segregation and property covenants wedged much of Santa Monica's minority population into the Pico area's densely populated blocks.
"The Santa Monica Freeway, completed in the mid-1960s, sliced through the Pico district, eliminating hundreds of apartments and houses, and cutting the neighborhood off from the city's downtown and more prosperous northern sectors. The hard edges that resulted contributed to a sense of physical isolation."

The Los Angeles Times depicts the problems of Santa Monica's Pico neighborhood, home of Santa Monica College.

The Liverpool of Mexico

"By 1966, flower power was taking hold. It was live music – rock, blues, Beatles fare – bringing young Americans. The bands, most members sporting Beatles-length hair, were vibrant and loud.
"And at the center of it all was Mike’s Bar, the place that would become a legend among Mexican musicians and American youths, their Mecca, their Whisky A Go Go. Four bands played there 18/7. And when Mike’s Bar opened another Mike’s in the same block on Avenida Revolución, there were eight bands, doubling the audience as well as the fun."

Fernando Romero in Los Angeles City Beat marks the death of Raúl “Socio” Crespo Villardel, kingpin of the 1960s music scene in Tijuana.

Social Insecurity

"On the field of ideology, 2005 was a lousy year for the American right. Twice--in the president's proposal to privatize Social Security and in the government's failure to save New Orleans--it confronted the public with the prospect of a radically reduced government. Twice, the public recoiled at the sight. In retrospect the year's biggest mystery is how George W. Bush thought he could privatize Social Security. Essentially Bush assumed the role of the national CEO who tells his workers he's dumping their defined-benefit pensions for some ill-defined 401(k) investment schemes. And essentially the American people responded with the same anger and anxiety that airline and auto employees have shown when their bosses reneged on their commitments of a secure retirement. The difference, of course, is that the American people have a lot more power as voters than they do as workers."

Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect discusses the human need for stability.

The Great Commoner's Revival

"Imagine the ideal democratic nominee for president. He’s twice won election in Nebraska, one of the reddest of states, and is just as popular across the South and Midwest. He’s a charismatic, energetic orator. He’s also a stalwart progressive who has taken tough stands against corporate crime, to aid labor organizers, and to raise taxes on the wealthy. His marriage is loving and cooperative, and his three children long to emulate their father. Although a war veteran, he’s an eloquent advocate of peaceful solutions to international conflicts. Most significantly, he’s a devout churchgoer and lay minister who preaches that every true Christian has a duty to transform a nation and world plagued by the arrogance of wealth and the pain of inequality."

Biographer Michael Kazin pitches William Jennings Bryan as a model for today's Democratic Party in The American Prospect. But historian Kevin Mattson is skeptical.

And Ed Kilgore in The Washington Monthly reviews Kazin's book.

Mission Impossible?

"If the disasters were inescapable, then we shouldn't get involved ever again in this sort of war. If they were preventable, then maybe these broader issues of war and peace can't be settled by this particular conflict, but we can draw the lesson that we should elect less dogmatic leaders; and the officers and advisers who counseled against those decisions, who turned out to be right all along, can draw the lesson that they should speak out more boldly, perhaps even resign in protest, if they find themselves mired in such catastrophes again."

In Slate, Fred Kaplan revisits the strategic errors of the Iraq War.

Free for All

"As Arsenault makes clear, the Freedom Rides revealed the pathology of the South. This was a society not simply of violent mobs but of judges who flagrantly disregarded the Constitution, police officers who conspired with criminals and doctors who refused to treat the injured. Southern newspapers almost universally condemned the riders as 'hate mongers' and outside agitators (even though about half had been born and raised in the South)."

Eric Foner reviews Raymond Arsenaut's Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice in The New York Times (via Ghost in the Machine).

Life and Debt

"Democrats often dream of wooing the 'Reagan Democrats' back into the fold. Bill Clinton, who could speak 'evangelical' and who embraced pro-family tax and welfare reforms, succeeded to some degree. Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, who actually coined the phrase 'Reagan Democrats,' argues that 'a new, family-centered politics can define and revitalize the Democratic party.' Its message should highlight 'family integrity and parental responsibility' and offer a 'progressive vision of family support.' Greenberg even theorizes that 'Roman Catholics would [again] rally to a Democratic party respectful of family and committed to defending government's unique role in supporting it.'"

In The Weekly Standard, Allan Carlson depicts how Republicans favor business over family values.


"The most important consequence of the financial hole the Margo Alperts are in, thanks to their education, is that many of them are going to be childless. Many others will have one child at most. How can a young couple, each with $40,000 or $50,000 of debt, think of having three or four kids? They will have to wait until they are in their late 30s to have a family and by then, when they think of college costs, they will feel compelled to limit themselves to one child."

And Nicholas Von Hoffman in The Nation explains how Republican loan policies undermine students.

Feeling a Draft?

"Contributing to the conspiracy of silence on all sides is the gross unfairness of the way we now share the risk and burden of fighting for one's country. The current distribution is consistent with periods when the United States had a draft that the sons of privilege could readily evade, by hiring 'replacements' during the Civil War, or getting an educational deferment or lobbying one's draft board during the Vietnam era. Once again, young people without good opportunities in life are handling the fighting and dying for those with better things to do—only this time, there is not even a pretense of shared responsibility for defending the country. Such injustice is hard to face up to in a country where social equality remains the civic religion."

Jacob Weisberg in Slate analyzes the unfairness of the all-volunteer military.

And in Slate in August 2007, Fred Kaplan writes that a draft may be necessary in order for the United States to maintain its international military profile.

The Nietzsche of the Niche Market

"Which brings us to this final joke on everyone: Movies are largely ceasing to be a mass medium and are becoming a collection of cults (of which the snob crowd is but one). The trend is an old one, beginning with the advent of television, which cost movies three-quarters of their audience in the 1950s. But now it is reaching a new crisis. You can see it in this year's best picture Oscar nominees, only one of which ('Munich') even aspired to reassemble the old audience. You can see it in the steady (and I think irreversible) decline in theatrical attendance. This means film snobs are really no different from, say, the 'opera queens,' once part of a vital mass audience and now a handful of devotees in frenzied pursuit of that bootleg recording of the Lisbon 'Traviata.' The same is true of all the formerly popular arts and media, even television in the cable age."

In the Los Angeles Times, movie critic Richard Schickel reviews The Film Snob's Dictionary by David Kamp with Lawrence Levi. One can read the Dictionary's introduction here.

Franz Ferdinand Frontman Shot By Gavrilo Princip Bassist

"Lead singer and guitarist for pop band Franz Ferdinand, Alexander Kapranos, is in critical condition today after being shot by a man identified as the bassist for rock group Gavrilo Princip. 'We ask fans to cooperate with Interpol to find the assailant, and call upon British Sea Power, Snow Patrol, and The Postal Service for help,' drummer Paul Thompson told music magazine NME monday. 'The suspect had links to The Decemberists and The Libertines, and we are following up on all leads.' It is unclear whether the shooting was linked to The Polyphonic Spree's invasion of Belgium earlier this week."

From The Onion.

Anyone but Osama

"As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They’ve got people on their side like the 'WebFairy,' who runs a site 'proving' the towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or 'ghost planes.' Still, the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle. As Nick Levis says, 'Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?'"

Mark Jacobson in New York covers the latest in 9/11 conspiracy theories.

And a year before, in March 2005, Popular Mechanics demolishes many conspiracy myths.

...And They All Look Just the Same

"There is more to the debate over sprawl than just anti-Wal-Mart hysteria and anger over traffic. At heart, it's about politics, broadly speaking. The decentralizing trends in living and working patterns, first in suburbs and later in exurbs, have been deeply problematic for the Democratic party and the American left. So have the decentralizing patterns of the American economy in the last several decades, and the ongoing decentralization of information and media."

In The Weekly Standard, historian Vincent J. Cannato reviews Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann.

Bleedin' 'eck!

"Americans have never taken to the slang word bloody, but Aussies use it a lot, and have for a long time. In the late 19th century, writes David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, it was known as 'the great Australian adjective,' and by the 1940s it was no longer considered a swear word.
"It was a different story in Britain, where bloody turned increasingly taboo after its debut in the 17th century."

Jan Freeman in The Boston Globe explores the sanguine intensifier.

The Politics of Childhood

"A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
"The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective."

In the Toronto Star, Kurt Kleiner reports on the latest, controversial, research connecting personality and politics.

What Are Museums For?

"Museums are, by definition, bastions of tradition and connoisseurship. If only all the directors and government apparatchiks responsible for them acknowledged this simple truth, museums would not be in the trouble they are in today. Unfortunately, these noble institutions have fallen victim to the cant of the age: on the one hand the market-driven utilitarianism of the right which has forced them to justify their existence in crude economic terms; on the other, the guilt-ridden orthodoxies of the cultural left."

James Delingpole in The Times (London) offers an answer.

Censure and Sensibility

"Still, history shows that [Russ Feingold] ought to move carefully. While many have compared the censure proposal to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, there is a more relevant precedent: In 1834, America's most famous political orator, Henry Clay of Kentucky, arranged the Senate's only successful censure of a president, Andrew Jackson — and he never stopped paying for his accomplishment."

Historian H.W. Brands in The New York Times assesses the legacy of presidential censure.

Free Harvard

"Why should Harvard take such a costly, unprecedented step? Partly because the percentage of low-income students enrolling at the nation's top colleges has been falling for the last decade. According to a 2004 report by the Century Foundation, only 3% of students at the nation's 146 most selective colleges come from the nation's lowest socioeconomic quarter; 74% come from the richest quarter. In other words, as Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation put it recently, if you wander around one of the nation's selective campuses, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one."

In the Los Angeles Times, Peter Hong proposes eliminating tuition at Harvard University.

Three week later in the Los Angeles Times, Catherine Hill of Vassar College and Gordon Winston of Williams College are not so sure.

The Erring Republican Majority

"Instead, [Phillips] identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy.

Once There Was a Spot...

"Secretary of Style" Oleg Cassini, designer for Jacqueline Kennedy, dies at age 92.

Patrick Go Bragh

"Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn't rid the land of snakes, didn't compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn't even Irish."

Slate revives a 2000 assessment of Saint Patrick by David Plotz.

The Rise of an American Historian

Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy wins a 2006 Bancroft Prize along with Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic and Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.
Addendum: The Washington Post includes a profile of Sean Wilentz here (via Ghost in the Machine).

Liberal Religion

"Moreover, as Christopher Lasch once noted, following the 1960s the left made the politically suicidal choice of cultural radicalism, which succeeded, over political and economic radicalism, which failed. Quoting Peter Steinfels, Dionne noted, 'American liberalism has shifted its passion from issues of economic deprivation and concentration of power to issues of gender, sexuality, and personal choice.... Once trade unionism, regulation of the market, and various welfare measures were the litmus tests of secular liberalism. Later, desegregation and racial justice were the litmus tests. Today the litmus test is abortion.'"

In The Nation, Eric Alterman notes the importance of connecting liberalism and religion.

A Rank System

"This competition spawns many evils that should shame a higher education system devoted to intellectual honesty. But perhaps the worst thing about it is what the ranking obsession is doing to the allocation of financial aid. More and more scholarship money is being shifted from aid based on financial need to aid based on 'merit.'
"That sounds nice -- who could be opposed to merit? But today's 'merit scholarships' are primarily bait to attract students with very high SAT scores who don't need the aid. The flip side is less aid available to students from less affluent families, who can't attend college without aid, or who must sacrifice academic work to paid jobs, or who graduate with staggering debt loads."

Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect describes the consequences of college rankings.


"My point is a more far-reaching one. Some people are smarter than others. Some people are less smart. The less smart don't just deserve a 'fair chance' to succeed, a chance they're bound to squander due to lesser ability. Instead, insofar as they're willing to work hard, contribute to society as best they can, and abide by the rules of the game, they deserve a fair share of society's wealth--the highest standard of living we can manage to arrange for them."

Matthew Yglesias adds further criticism of supposed merit in The American Prospect.

A Real Horrorshow

"Kubrick even suggests that this is a happy outcome: better an authentic psychopath than a conditioned, and therefore inauthentic, goody-goody. Authenticity and self-direction are thus made to be the highest goods, regardless of how they are expressed. And this, at least in Britain, has become a prevailing orthodoxy among the young. If, as I have done, you ask the aggressive young drunks who congregate by the thousand in every British town or city on a Saturday night why they do so, or British soccer fans why they conduct themselves so menacingly, they will reply that they are expressing themselves, as if there were nothing further to be said on the matter."

In City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple looks back on Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

Wilsonian Hamiltonians or Jeffersonian Jacksonians?

"In liberal circles, in other words, Jeffersonianism is giving Jacksonianism intellectual cover. But make no mistake: Jacksonianism is where the votes are. For Democrats, stealing the Bush administration's populist, unilateralist thunder would be a remarkable coup. And it would be a remarkable historical irony, since Jacksonianism in Jeffersonian clothes--civil libertarian, anti-globalization, uninterested in transforming the world--inverts the foreign policy of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton."

Peter Beinart in The New Republic analyzes the ports controversy by using Russell Mead's categories of American foreign policy.

Back in the USSR

"Six years ago, 22-year-old UCLA history student Justinian Jampol was in Berlin doing research when he came across some communist-era artifacts he wanted to save and ship home. It struck him that something should be done to prevent more of these relics from disappearing into, well, history."

Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times explores Culver City's Wende Museum, dedicated to preserving the material culture of the Soviet Bloc.

The Giant Sucking Sound

"[James Sensenbrenner] helped establish a system that increased investment opportunities for major corporations and diminished the rights, power and, in many instances, living standards of workers on both sides of the border. Now he and his Republican colleagues are stirring the resentments of the same American workers they placed in jeopardy by supporting the corporate trade agenda."

In The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson cautions Republicans over economic policy and immigration.

Hoovering Up Dissent

"To this day, no individual has claimed responsibility for the break-in. The FBI, after building up a six-year, 33,000-page file on the case, couldn't solve it. But it remains one of the most lastingly consequential (although underemphasized) watersheds of political awareness in recent American history, one that poses tough questions even today for our national leaders who argue that fighting foreign enemies requires the government to spy on its citizens. The break-in is far less well known than Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers three months later, but in my opinion it deserves equal stature."

In the Los Angeles Times, Allan M. Jalon marks the thirty-fifty anniversary of the public discovery of the FBI's COINTELPRO.

I'll Take "Innocents Abroad" for $800, Alex

Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect presents a challenge for potential Democratic candidates.