When I first began reporting from Chicago's West Side 24 years ago, what most upended me was the violence. Four boys I got to know have since been murdered, another two convicted of murder. One mother whom I befriended fell so deep into grief after a gang member executed her 15-year-old son that for a period of time she could eat nothing but sand. Such violence disrupts the psyche of communities. Businesses leave. Schools can't teach. Families, if they're able, move out. On Chicago's West or South Side, block-club signs, ordinarily a testament of cohesiveness and pride, reflect a community back on its heels. One sign, which is typical, reads: "No loitering. No gambling dice or cards. No alcohol drinking. No playing loud music. No repairing cars. No playing ball."
In the late 1990s, when Robin Chase and her co-founders started testing names for what would become the car-sharing network Zipcar, they quickly learned to avoid the word "sharing." "Every one that had the word 'share' in it," she says, "about 40 percent of the people hated. They thought, 'It's going to be dirty -- crummy -- like the 1960s, and I'm going to have to wait.' Imagine if hotels were called bed-sharing."
Kathryn McGarr's new biography of Robert Strauss -- Democratic macher, superlawyer, and certified D.C. Wise Man -- could not be more timely. Since the tea-stained Republican takeover of the House and return of government gridlock, Washington pundits have been dreaming of an old-style bipartisan deal-maker who can bring political adversaries to the table and hash out difficult compromises in private. The Whole Damn Deal: Robert Strauss and the Art of Politics is an admiring portrayal of Strauss's career that reminds us how Washington used to work, but it illustrates, albeit inadvertently, the limitations of the idealized deal-maker as white knight and why the nostalgia for that Beltway type is misconceived today.
Back in the Clinton years, a friend moved to D.C. to become a Washington correspondent. Shortly after he arrived, the job fell through. When I called to ask how he was doing, he told me he was actually kind of relieved: "I realized that I love politics," he said, "but that I don't give a damn about government. It bores me stiff."
(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) One World Trade Center, center, is reflected in a pool of water at National September 11 Memorial, which opens to the public today.
The widely anticipated National 9/11 Memorial, "Reflecting Absence," opens to the public today, finalizing the decade-long argument about how to honor an event with which the country is still coming to terms. Committing the past to two cavernous voids, the memorial spreads horizontally over eight of the 16 acres of the World Trade Center, dipping underground into reflecting pools constructed in the footprints of the twin towers. The outside area, which opened yesterday to the families of victims, features what the site's designer, Michael Arad, has called a "living park" of swamp white oak trees whose rows are interrupted by the negative space of the tower imprints.
(AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) University of Miami quarterback Jacory Harris
In the annals of college football scandals, nothing about the details tying the University of Miami -- which started its season Monday with eight players missing after NCAA sanctions -- and dozens of its student-athletes to a rogue booster turned Ponzi-scheme convict seems all that fresh or uncommon.
If the claims of felon and former Miami superfan Nevin Shapiro and the reporting of sports journalism's itinerant watchdog Yahoo! Sports are to be believed, there were extravagant parties at South Beach nightclubs and on million-dollar yachts, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash handouts, and pimping.
Dick Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir is a book as dull and unimaginative as its title. Readers wouldn't have expected the former vice president and his daughter Liz (his co-author) to be a pair of subtle prose stylists, and they won't be disappointed. Slog through the early chapters on Cheney's life growing up in Wyoming (he fished, he played football), and you'll eventually reach more momentous events, which Cheney is able to render equally lifeless.
That's in part because of the way Cheney confronts the controversies that have attended so much of his public life. His descriptions of events tend to run as follows: Some things happened. Our critics said we were wrong. But they don't know what they're talking about, because we were right.
Dick Cheney's In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir is a book as dull and unimaginative as its title. Readers wouldn't have expected the former vice president and his daughter Liz (his co-author) to be a pair of subtle prose stylists, and they won't be disappointed. Slog through the early chapters on Cheney's life growing up in Wyoming (he fished, he played football), and you'll eventually reach more momentous events, which Cheney is able to render equally lifeless.
That's in part because of the way Cheney confronts the controversies that have attended so much of his public life. His descriptions of events tend to run as follows: Some things happened. Our critics said we were wrong. But they don't know what they're talking about, because we were right.
Let's recap what happened on the just-concluded fifth season of AMC's Mad Men. Ad exec Don Draper (Jon Hamm) blew his brains out after adding up the total number of women he'd slept with and realizing it topped the population of Schenectady. Soon after Don's death, his ex-secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) met the young Ellen Willis (guest star Emma Watson, fresh from wrapping her part as Hermione in the Harry Potter franchise). Peggy became such a wild-eyed contributor to The Redstockings Manifesto that even Shulamith Firestone (the Emmy-nominated Lindsay Lohan, finally living up to her youthful promise) had to ask her to tone it down.
You're the proverbial alien on our planet, fresh off the UFO. You found a job -- congratulations! -- and you've just received your first paycheck. On the stub, you notice that something, or someone, named "FICA" is skimming 6 percent off the top. "Oh, that's Social Security," your new colleagues tell you. But what's that?
Musical theater is as close as it comes to religion for me, so you can consider Glee's 8-to-9 Tuesday slot on Fox my "Hour of Power." Like a missionary outpost in D.C.'s cultural desert, each week a local gay bar screens the latest episode on a large projector. For that short span of time, the club music and cruising stop while patrons from their 20s to their 60s sit in reverent silence to watch the high-school travails of McKinley High's glee club.
If you ask me, any show that can hold a club queen's attention for that long deserves its title as "the gayest show on television."
There's a tense scene in Eric Pooley's The Climate War when Jim Rogers, CEO of coal utility Duke Energy and leader of a shaky coalition of power companies, faces a moment of truth. Ten Fortune 500 companies and four major environmental groups are at the table. They've got a statement of legislative principles they can agree on and are ready to throw their collective weight behind a long-overdue comprehensive climate-change bill in the United States. They just need his sign-off. For Rogers, under intense pressure from his industry's biggest polluters, it amounts to a career-risking leap into the dark.
COMMON SENSE: A POLITICAL HISTORY BY SOPHIA ROSENFELD Harvard University Press, 337 pages, $29.95, BY SUSAN DUNN
Common sense, Thomas Paine boasted in 1776, stood firmly on the side of the people. "There is something absurd," he wrote in Common Sense, his best-selling political pamphlet, "in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." And it was "very ridiculous," he declared at the dawn of the American Revolution, for a hereditary monarch, a "youth of twenty-one (which hath often happened)," to rule over several million people, all older and wiser than himself.
WIKILEAKS: INSIDE JULIAN ASSANGE'S WAR ON SECRECY
BY DAVID LEIGH AND LUKE HARDING, PublicAffairs, 339 pages, $15.99
OPEN SECRETS: WIKILEAKS, WAR, AND AMERICAN DIPLOMACY EDITED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES STAFF, ALEXANDER STAR, AND BILL KELLER
Grove Press, 523 pages, $16.95
WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY BY MICAH L. SIFRY, OR Books, 211 pages, $17.00
The actor Ryan Reynolds before a panel at Comic-Con International for the Green Lantern, which premiers this June. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)
A purple-skinned alien hurtles across the cosmos, bearing a ring that grants its wearer unimaginable power. The alien is mortally wounded, and the ring is seeking its next wearer -- the Green Lantern, Earth's champion -- by finding the planet's most courageous inhabitant.
In a world with billions of people, what are the chances that the ring's next owner is a white American dude?
