"The Moonbeam Has Landed"

"He also wants to use his office to 'promote urban growth in a sustainable way,' what he calls 'elegant density.' As mayor of Oakland, Brown built or won approval for new housing for 10,000 residents in an area that had been a relative dead zone in long-troubled Oakland’s downtown. He won widespread praise from the real estate and investment businesses—and criticism from the left, for promoting gentrification."

The LA Weekly profiles California's new attorney general, Jerry Brown.

And Tim Reiterman in the Los Angeles Times checks in with Brown in August.

The Heart of Screenland

"But that, say the new locals, is exactly why they are moving here. 'There is a feeling of openness here,' says the New School of Cooking owner Anne Smith, a seven-year resident. 'It's still a city on the verge. It still has character, which is what makes Culver City great. My personal hope is that it doesn't ever become Santa Monica.'"

The New York Times explores the charms of Culver City, California.

Broken Power

"For more than five years, we have been fighting over what to do at Ground Zero, and the future of much of the sixteen-acre site is still unresolved. The idea of Moynihan Station—a conversion of the classical Farley Post Office, on Eighth Avenue, into an improved Penn Station—was first proposed a decade ago, and it still hasn’t happened. By contrast, Moses’s plan to cover miles of train tracks on the Upper West Side with an extension of Riverside Park took under three years from design to completion. In an era when almost any project can be held up for years by public hearings and reviews by community boards, community groups, civic groups, and planning commissions, not to mention the courts, it is hard not to feel a certain nostalgic tug for Moses’s method of building by decree."

In The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger charts a reevaluation of public-works builder Robert Moses.

In Living Color

The Library of Congress unveils scores of color photographs taken between 1939 and 1945.

Republican "-rat"

"Whatever the initial impulse or rationale, the term became controversial as far back as the 1950s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) famously used it to deride Democrats during his hearings investigating whether Communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. During the 1956 Republican convention, the usage was so common that it prompted the New York Times to report that dropping the '-ic' had become official party policy."

Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times explores why Republican politicians insist on confusing nouns and adjectives.

"Liberalism" and Its Discontents

"The term connects us to our past--to names like Roosevelt and Truman, Acheson and Schelsinger, Keynes and Galbraith. These people did more than simply improve everyday life for most Americans. They and their acolytes helped save capitalism from both its threats abroad and its contradictions within. That's a pretty impressive legacy."

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic argues in favor of embracing the "liberal" label.

Webb-Slinger

"He spoke of how the income of ordinary workers had slowly been eclipsed by the spike in corporate salaries. He spoke of the 'forgotten' middle class with a dyspeptic passion that nonetheless seemed from the heart: 'When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times.
"'In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.' We haven’t heard such blunt class resentment from a Southern Democrat in quite a while."

Andrew Sullivan introduces Senator Jim Webb to British readers in The Sunday Times.

And the senator's website posts the text of his speech.

Confessions of a Pop Singer

"'If I did write anything political, they would probably be the same things I was writing 20 years ago, which is even more depressing really,' he mulls. 'A lot of things I did write at that time still stand up anyway, unfortunately, because I don’t think the world’s moved on, politically anyway.'"

In the LA Weekly, Paul Rogers interviews Paul Weller on the eve of an American showcase tour.

And Carl Rosen adds an assessment in New York.

Stabbed in the Back?

"It is true that Congress restricted U.S. operations and cut aid to the South, and these moves did indeed facilitate the eventual Northern victory. But these events were entirely predictable; the settlement the Nixon administration negotiated left the South vulnerable to future attacks. To the American public, the most important fact about the Paris Accords was that American troops and prisoners came home; it was precisely because a guarantee of renewed U.S. military intervention would have been so controversial that Nixon had to make his promises to Thieu in secret."

Gideon Rose in Slate dispells the right-wing narrative as to how the Vietnam War ended.

And Rick Perstein concurs in The New Republic.

Lies, Damned Lies, etc.

"Focusing principally on three milestones in the annals of empirical research — the famous study of Muncie, Ind., published as 'Middletown' in 1929; the emergence of George Gallup’s and Elmo Roper’s political polling in the 1930s; and the publication of the infamous Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953 — Igo chronicles the emergence of a 'mass society' and the transformation of the American consciousness along statistical lines. In telling this story, Igo does for social statistics what Louis Menand’s 'Metaphysical Club' did for American pragmatism, providing a narrative intellectual history of the field."

Scott Stossel in The New York Times reviews Sarah Igo's The Averaged American.

Who Was the Most Influential American?

The Atlantic wants to know.

Chronicle of Our Death Retold

"They came, they outraged, they moved on, but they left more DNA behind than O. J. Simpson. Spy’s influence is everywhere today, from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to — Time, even. If there’s a bit of chest-thumping and backslapping in this dandy 20th anniversary volume — Carter and Andersen are referred to variously as the “Lennon and McCartney of publishing, the Nichols and May, the Woodward and Bernstein” and for good measure, “Mick and Keith”; O.K., O.K., we get it, you were good, you were gods — one inclines to forgive, because they really were that good."

Christopher Buckley reviews Spy: The Funny Years in The New York Times.

Where Have You Gone, Buckner & Garcia?

Play all the classic Bally and Nintendo games you wish at 1980-games.com.

In Love

"'Crazy' is elegant, old-fashioned songwriting—a taut, melancholy melody that unfolds with impeccable logic over some basic chord changes and erupts into a heart-grabbing singalong chorus. Its transparency and simplicity, and the grandeur of that rising and tumbling chorus, gives the song a timeless feel. Like many of the best pop tunes, 'Crazy' seems like it has always existed—like it wasn't written so much as yanked out of the ether."

Jody Rosen in Slate analyzes the song of 2006.

Ignore Those Nickels

"But our fascination with Lewis and Clark is much more about us than about them. The expedition is a useful American mythology: How a pair of hardy souls and their happy-go-lucky multiculti flotilla discovered Eden, befriended the Indian, and invented the American West. The myth of Lewis and Clark papers over the grittier story of how the United States conquered the land, tribe by slaughtered, betrayed tribe."

From 2002, Slate's David Plotz reassesses the Corps of Discovery.

We Look to Los Angeles...

...for a variety of discotheques spinning British pop, as explained by the Los Angeles Times.

History's Mysteries

"Contrarian impulses, counterintuitive thinking, dissent from established interpretations—in the wrong hands, these propensities can be offensively slick, but in the right hands they're the stuff of scholarship. Historians, after all, don't toil in the archives to adduce more evidence confirming everything we always knew."

In the wake of the film version of The History Boys, Slate republishes this assessment of the stageplay by David Greenberg.

And Tristram Hunt in The Guardian reviews a new biography of AJP Taylor, the first "TV don."

Special Special Collections

"The archive is grounds for meditation. The brain wanders while one sits waiting for the next box to be called up or while culling through reams of irrelevant correspondence, waiting for a pattern to emerge or seeking a certain gem.
"But not all archives are the same. In recent months, my daydreaming in various facilities has yielded a recurrent question: What would constitute the Ideal Archive?"

Christopher Phelps answers this question in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Endgame

Rosa Brooks in the Los Angeles Times and Peter Beinart in The New Republic contemplate the risks for Democrats if and when the Iraq War ends.

"The Words You Use Should Be Your Own"

"These examples help bring a crucial issue of plagiarism into focus. Behind the talk of originality lurks another preoccupation, less plainly voiced: a concern about the just distribution of labor. In plenty of instances of so-called plagiarism, what bothers us isn't so much a lack of originality as the fact that the plagiarizer has stolen someone else's work—the time it took to write the words or do the necessary research."

Meghan O'Rourke in Slate contemplates the offense of plagiarism.

Death, Italian Style

The Los Angeles Times runs an obit for movie producer Carlo Ponti, the world's luckiest man.

Poll Cats

Picking up the fallen staff from The Village Voice, the LA Weekly publishes its first annual film critics poll.

Without Masters

"To his credit, however, Ely unfashionably resists many of the temptations to which historians of the subaltern fall prey: to translate all black self-activity into activism; to elevate the understandable pursuit of familial security, economic advancement, and personal dignity into full-fledged political agency; and to locate overt or covert anti-slavery or anti-racist politics in his subjects' quest for independence and autonomy. Reluctant to impress the black Israelites into political service as recognizable front-line soldiers in the long black struggle for freedom, he instead appreciates them on their own terms."

In The New Republic, Eric Arnesen reviews Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom From the 1790s Through the Civil War.

The Empiricists

"Those earlier liberals shared the faith of their time, in the transformative capacity of government. Today's liberals have come of age doubting the faith of theirs, in the transformative capacity of capitalism. From deregulation to free trade, they are more skeptical of the unfettered market than the Clintonites of the '90s. But their skepticism stems less from ideological antipathy than from empirical observation--a suspicion that the free-marketers prefer the visions in their head to the facts on the ground."

Peter Beinart in The New Republic describes the realty-based position of American liberals.

Ciao, Baby

"Startlingly beautiful, she was a young American aristocrat whose Boston Brahmin ancestor, Endicott Peabody, had founded the Groton School and mentored the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her on-screen presence in 'Vinyl' ignited a quintessential love affair with the camera. She does nothing but sit to one side smoking cigarettes while ogling the sadomasochistic action. But it's hard to take your eyes off her. The 22-year-old is luminous."

In the wake of Factory Girl, three Los Angeles Times critics ponder Edie Sedgwick.

Anniversary Edition

"60th anniversary of the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which curtailed the ability of unions to strike (June 23, 1947).
"Today’s perspective: 'Unions?' ¿Que son esos?"

Bruce Handy in The New York Times looks ahead to events to be commemorated in 2007.

The Mind of the Mistress Class

The New York Times runs an obit for historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

The Staff of Life

The Los Angeles Times has an obituary for Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles.

And in The New York Times, Lawrence Downes offers an appreciation.

Exceptional American

The Los Angeles Times runs an obit for sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who died on December 31 at age 84.

And Nathan Glazer in The New Republic writes an appreciation.

I'll Have the Roast Duck, with the Mango Salsa

YouTube has those Geico Caveman commercials:

Not cool!
That is really condescending.
I don't have much of an appetite, thank you.
Well apparently not, because I'm looking right at it.
Ok, first of all, I'm not 100% in love with your tone right now.
I'll put it on speaker.

Accurate or Alarmist?

"You are caught in the dilemma that ensnares everyone preoccupied with fanaticism. You describe Mormonism in a way that makes perfect sense to non-Mormons and no sense to Mormons themselves. This means, to me, that you are describing the inside of your own mind as much as the reality of Mormonism. Mormons will hear a lot of this so long as Romney is in the race, and it will baffle them every time."

Columbia University Professor Emeritus Richard L. Bushman criticizes The New Republic's cover story on Mitt Romney and the Mormon Church. (And the story's author responds.)

And Bushman later pens his own defense of Mormon politicians.

Long Live the King

"But the greatest challenge to Doug’s modus vivendi comes from Carrie, and the result is the series’s elegant equilibrium. Exuberant, open-book, gluttonous Doug is married to a woman of cosmetics, schemes and guile. His inertia, it turns out, is their shared honesty; but her guile is their ambition, and it’s what allows them to keep moving. It’s a lovely dynamic. It could almost last forever."

Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times bids adieu to The King of Queens, now in its final season.

Perennial Revision

"History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist."

In The New York Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. offers a meditation on the meaning of history.