Impeach the bums! Or at least make them stand up and defend themselves -- not just now, but always. That's the modest proposal of one commenter on the Huffington Post boards. His name is J. Sarets, and he takes his inspiration from how things worked in college:

"The issue of impeachment reminds me of my fraternity days. The bylaws required that every officer stand for a vote of confidence (VOC) at least once during his term. These votes were a formality scheduled ahead of time. The officer does a minute speech on his performance, maybe the brothers ask a couple questions, then we vote to keep him in his position.

But we did this for a reason. By repeating this process every year, we defeated the psychology that calling a VOC is a huge deal that should be done reluctantly. So when an officer wasn't doing a good job, we were prepared to call him on it. Officers realized that, at the very least, they would be accountable for their performance at their scheduled VOC and whenever they screw up.

So here's an outlandish suggestion: A Constitutional Amendment that requires the president to stand for impeachment at least once during each term. Usually it would be a formality, or so we would hope. But it would hold the president accountable to Congress (and therefore the public) for his actions, and in the event of any wrongdoing, Congress wouldn't be so uptight about impeachment."

The schoolmarm was having some trouble with the kids in class. So she went to the principal's office. Now she's returned with a pair of boxing gloves, to beat those kids black and blue -- especially the one who refuses to sit down, John Edwards.

Things I notice about Hillary Clinton in this clip:

1. She claps her hands like a puppet! She never bends her hands in order to produce a "sound cavity," the way an Alpha Male would. Instead, she slams them against each other like two stiff boards.

2. There is something Halloweeny about her today! Her "smile" spreads across her face like a gash knifed into a jack o'lantern.

3. She constantly says one thing: "I'm tired!" Or her supporters are. Today Gerald McEntee, even while endorsing her, said, "We are tired! Tired! Of close elections."

Who is she, Rosa Parks?

There is lots to be tired of these days. One thing I am tired of is the Clintons. I am tired of being asked one last time to summon my energies against those evil Republicans who have been hounding her for almost twenty years now -- only to find out she just voted with them again. On the other hand, I'm very, very frightened of her! There is no question that America would do its homework in a Hillary administration.

Halloween in the Bronx, my father tells me, was not a festive affair in the 1950's. Only a few of the nerdier tykes went out to trick-or-treat, invariably hounded by gangs of their elders -- preteen "J.D.'s" who haunted the streets swinging chalk-filled socks, with which they lashed the younger kids, imprinting their ridicule in puffs of white dust.

As America geared up for the obesity epidemic, Halloween began to turn on the wheels of gluttony. In Seattle, I lived in prime candy-collecting territory -- block after block of upper middle-class families in mid-sized houses, with few winding roads or steps. Some kids went out bearing garbage bags and, it seemed to me at the time, filled them up much of the way.

There were families -- dentists, mostly -- who handed out tiny boxes of Sun-Maid raisins. They were fun to laugh at. But while sugar reigned, "values" prevailed in the holiday's arts and crafts aura. Halloween was an imaginative holiday, a time when kids could invent and pretend. I remember one year in particular, when I went out as a detective and together my mother and I made a giant magnifying glass out of cardboard, with cellophane in the middle.

Now Halloween has taken a new turn. It's become more like Mardi Gras: a chance for people to cross boundaries of identity and behavior that they would never dream of crossing on any other day of the year, particularly not in daylight. A few years ago, a friend of mine went as Private Lynndie England, the She-Wolf of Abu Ghraib, and her friend, an Indian American, dressed up as a torture victim (a variation on the costume of ghost).

Joel Stein writes in a hilarious column for the L.A. Times that adults are ruining the children's holiday:

"This year, I was invited to six Halloween parties, which would not be strange if it weren't for the fact that I'm older than 12. Meanwhile, I was invited to zero New Year's Eve parties last year. People vastly prefer Halloween parties because New Year's Eve involves dressing up like an adult, whereas Halloween involves dressing up like a slut.

I understand that the masquerade ball is a classic that faded away, and that people need an opportunity to hide behind a mask in order to safely express their hidden selves. It makes sense that once a year I get to peek into your psyche and find out whether you think of yourself as a whore nurse, a whore pirate, a whore angel or a whore whore.

That's fine. But not on the kids' favorite day. It's transforming formerly child-friendly costume shops from fun-creepy into Chris Hansen-creepy."

I confess to staying in Brooklyn tonight, far away from the Village drag queens, slutty house parties, and marauding frat boys who travel south from the Upper East Side. But I'm not a chalk-swinger either. I like the idea of people getting a chance to try on new selves.

A quote from this week's Economist:

"Running Baghdad is not like trying to police New York City; it's like the Iraqi police trying to run New York City."
--David Kilcullen, counter-insurgency advisor to General Petraeus

A long, long time ago there was this woman who wrote sexually revealing columns about her life as a single woman in New York City. She was named Candace Bushnell and her column was called Sex and the City. Somewhat less long of a time ago there was this girl, Natalie Krinsky, who wrote sexually revealing columns about her life at Yale. The column was called Sex and the (Elm) City. Since then a hundred young flowers have bloomed. Spit or swallow? Spit or swallow? It's a question that consumes the Ivy League -- or would seem to, based on the number of quadrangle feminists vigorously tugging bananas in pursuit of book deals. Welcome to the Age of Confessional Depilation, in which no secret remains unshaven.

Are these girls vagitarians? For the most part not, though Yale had a gay sex columnist. At Dartmouth they have not one but TWO flirty provocateurs -- one straight and the other not, though some think she's a LUG (lesbian until graduation). Whatever -- she knows where a clitoris is. Which takes us to Harvard's Lena Chen, who turned the Crimson red with her writing samples, and therefore writes a blog instead. Its title: Sex and the Ivy. Last week Lena debated with Janie Fredell, leader of the campus abstinence group True Love Revolution. Now there's a girl who won't be getting a book deal. Put it out, Janie! Are you a feminist or not?

How big is Web 2.0? Not as big as it's going to get -- but that doesn't mean it's a bubble. John Heilemann is just back from the Web 2.0 Summit, where he spoke with former journalist and now big-time venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Heilemann writes in this week's New York:

"I asked Moritz what sort of piece he would have done, were he still a hack, to capture the industry’s gestalt. Cheekily, Moritz replied that he would have written about the irrelevance of such stories: Who reads newspapers anymore, anyway? (Touché!)"

Is there speculation? Lots. Will companies fail? You bet. There's no reason why they won't. But the fundamentals beneath the speculation suggest an industry with a strong growth curve, backed by powerful technologies that are changing people's lives -- and the most invasive advertising presence known to mankind:

"Despite some tremors, online advertising is now a juggernaut that promises to only become more powerful as companies like Facebook start creating sophisticated networks where fine-grained behavioral targeting is possible. More than 1.3 billion consumers around the world now use the Internet, and the global growth curve is steep. Meanwhile, the main source of unbridled mania in the nineties, IPOs, are a nonfactor this time around. Instead, the boom is being driven by giants with riverine profit flows and vast reservoirs of cash."

If you had a choice between being governed by a schoolmarm or the guy who was running for class president, who would you choose? (Or, as the schoolmarm might ask, WHOM?) Exactly! Which is why Hillary's winning the race for President.

Barack Obama announces he's finally going to start running for President of the U.S. instead of class president on the EXACT SAME WEEKEND his great supporter Donnie McClurkin gets up and starts bashing the gays at Barack's "Embrace the Change" gospel concert series. If this were Hillary's campaign, whoever forgot to kick McClurkin off the stage would get slapped with the ruler.

Here's how CNN reports it:

"Don't call me a bigot or anti-gay, when I have been touched by the same feelings," McClurkin went on. "When I have suffered with the same feelings. Don't call me a homophobe, when I love everybody … Don't tell me that I stand up and I say vile words against the gay community because I don't. I don't speak against the homosexual. I tell you that God delivered me from homosexuality."

I have two things to say about this. First, Embrace the change, Donnie! Don't fight it, switch! Second, doesn't Barack Obama know that you ALWAYS round up the hard-core haters before you make a big announcement? It's that kind of distraction that kills a campaign.

Barack says the gloves are coming off. Perhaps -- but it's a case of a velvet glove wrapped around a velvet fist. (Or, as McClurkin might put it, a limp wrist.) There is no steel to be had in the Obama campaign, except in the case of Michelle.

From a Metafilter discussion on "Rave Culture in North Carolina" comes a brief personal bio on the ups and downs of living inside a cultural revolution. The poster's name is Unicorn on the Cob:

Um... I was a raver in 1989. It was my senior year of high school. I can attest to the immense sense of freedom and future social benefits that this culture had on me.

I attended my first warehouse party in November 1989. I remember every fiber in my being telling me that this sound, this music, was the future. I was listening to "Welcome to Techno City" by the legendary Juan Atkins. At this time, ecstacy was legal and pharmaceutical grade in Dallas and I ingested it. Not frequently, but still...

I began funding and throwing parties out of my own pocket around 1994.

Joined a DJ collective in 96.

And subsequently lost somewhere in the neighborhood of five grand, while also helping throw one party that netted 20 grand.

Imagine if you printed up flyers, set up three tents in a field that was three acres big, made $20,000, and eight thousand people showed up.

Imagine if when the sun came up, your body flooded with ecstacy, surrounded by friends, you were dancing and the entire body of people felt like it was levitating.

A rolling wave of sound, then literally, several hundred people's hands, filled with sunflowers, shot into the air at the same time and everyone screamed the word YES. YES. YES.

Look around. Tears are streaming down everyone's faces. You genuinely feel like the vibrations from eight thousand people dancing will draw the Earth's energy into a light-beam of pure goodness and shoot straight up. People cannot ignore it. You have CHANGED THEIR LIVES FOR THE GREATER.

An informal survey of the party reveals that people from as far away as Scotland have come to your party... without being paid or booked to play. There are famous people there (at least, famous to you).

Shyly, Roy Davis Jr. asks if he can play a sunrise set, even though he isn't booked. You laugh and agree, asking your boyfriend to wait an hour to play The Orb, et al.

Imagine opening XLR8R magazine a month later and seeing photos of your parties. Your dj collective is world famous now. You are putting out records. You are all going to be a cultural force that is going to make a positive impact on Texas, and maybe, just MAYBE, the world.

You marry your DJ sweetheart and enjoy 10 years of parties, events, nightclub ownership, your own record label, and you see your friends disperse and tour the world. You see them open their own record labels in different cities.

Now, imagine that slowly, everyone gets married. Has kids. Become alcoholics. A vast amount of them become addicted to methamphetamines. As in, sixty percent. Including your husband. He turns into someone you don't know and leaves you in crippling debt. Your "friends" are suddenly protecting him and lying to you. You are forced to flee everything you know and, with a good credit rating and a decent job, have to start over your entire life from scratch. Your identity doesn't exist any more; but then again, there is opportunity in that, too...

Suddenly you don't like house music any more. Rave is a four-letter word. Anything with a 4/4 beat brings back bad memories for you; your former compatriots, when you see them, look nocturnal. Shifty. Diseased.

You stumble upon the occasional post online or link to photos of parties thrown by "new ravers on the block" or "neo-ravers." Your youngest friends were maybe 6 years old when you were raving; to them, it's "retro night."

You look back on the past and realize that for a while, you had it. Shangri-La. Nirvana. You had respect, community, music, freedom, love, a real family made by choice.

But the thing about being part of a zeitgeist is, that moment passes. I've read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I know that I was part of one... and now, it's been superceded. It's a joke, like disco was in the mid-80's.

Oh well. I have my memories, and I look forward to Life 2.0.

But I can't look at anything with the word RAVE in it and not feel saddened and tainted by it.

If you were there, you know. If you weren't, my god, I wish I could show you what it was like.

We can never have that moment again. But me? Je ne regrette rien.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 11:00 AM on October 24 [167 favorites]

New York's two biggest industries are finance and nightlife, in that order. It makes sense: people stay single ever later in life, and what else would they do after a long day's i-banking but go out to a club? But a new book argues that New York's real competitive advantage -- the one thing that keeps people coming here and nowhere else -- is its culture. It's called The Warhol Economy and it's by Elizabeth Currid. James Suroweicki reviews it in this week's New Yorker:

"Using an economic-analysis tool called a 'location quotient,' Currid calculates that New York matters far more to fashion, art, and culture than to finance. To exaggerate a bit, if New York suddenly disappeared, stock markets could keep functioning, but we would not be able to dress ourselves or find art to put on the wall."

The reason: clustering. People tend to live and work in places where people in their industry have already congregated. New York has the galleries, the labels, the studios -- and so the artists come here.

I wonder if there isn't something else at work, too: the vanishing of the American city, followed by its rebirth. The other day on WKCR, I heard Phil Schaap talking about the huge jazz scene that emerged in Philadelphia and also in Pittsburgh -- each a great American city with a sizable black population and a large manufacturing base.

Today, they're low on the culture scale. But, as I recently posted, they're "bloggier" -- in real terms -- than New York. As cities rehab and take on new people, you will see them competing, first at the margins and then in real ways, for the crown of cultural dominance. But -- as Currid wrote in an essay upon leaving Pittsburgh at the age of 24 -- only if city leaders stop investing in stadiums and mall walks and start investing in the culture industries:

"This 24-year-old is not leaving Pittsburgh because she thinks Carrie Bradshaw is cool or there are better bars and clubs in New York City. She is leaving because she feels that even though New York has 8 million residents and is going strong, it is a city that takes its young minds and its baseball stadiums seriously. "

Roger Cohen returns to Afghanistan for the first time since 1973, then hikes to the top of the mountain where Shamama and Salsal used to sit. These were the two Buddhas of Bamiyan, blown away by the Taliban in 2001. Looking back from that precipice on a time when we were supposedly in the midst of a war for the fate of society and the world, Cohen reflects on what has changed and remained the same. In '73, he concludes, one could drive from London directly to Afghanistan -- but not today:

"Looking again, after 34 years, at this beautiful place, first from the top of the smaller niche and then from the larger, (“20 people could sit on this head,” said Qassim), I wondered: Was it my own innocence that was gone or the world’s?

Nobody could make that journey now. Nobody could even drive from Kabul to Kandahar in safety. The unknown shrinks. Fear spreads. Experience gets diluted."

"If you white, you're all right. If you brown, stick around. But as you black ... git back, git back, git back."

I was reminded of Big Bill Broonzy's famous song tonight by Sasha Frere-Jones' brilliant and controversial New Yorker piece on indie rock's case of white flight -- the decline of roots/blues in anything white people might download to their i-pod earbuds. There once was a time when Kurt Cobain seemed white, didn't he? But Nirvana's just a deeper shade of pale when stacked up to the eggshell Decemberists and Arcade Fire.

One sign of the segregation of modern-day pop tastes arrives in a compelling review of Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a work of musical history that views (or hears) the century past through the prism of our ears. The trouble comes toward the end of the book, Geoff Dyer writes in his Times review. And then he comes close to arguing, though not explicitly, that jazz -- an all-American art-form -- is the twentieth century's classical music, an argument no Thelonious Monk fan would contest. He writes:

"And while America produced both homegrown composers of 'straight music' (to use the jazzer’s preferred term) and composers of popular music deserving classic status -- Ellington, Gershwin, Bernstein -- many of the most challenging ideas of the avant-garde were disseminated through jazz (often regarded as 'black classical music')."

But for Ross, jazz fails to meet the definition of "classical" music, and therefore it's decidedly off subject. Dyer writes: "John Coltrane is mentioned, but relatively speaking, his importance here seems to derive from the way Steve Reich saw him play a bunch of times."

Racism is hardly the point, since Coltrane was not a composer but a brilliant improviser, and therefore he seems not to fit Ross' biographical parameters. But, getting back to the title of the book, a question comes to mind. Can anyone really listen -- meaningfully listen -- to the twentieth century without concentrating for a while on Coltrane, a man who came to embody mid-60's consciousness, and whose image still hangs on dorm-room walls? The trouble comes when we micro-segregate our tastes, musical and otherwise, to the point where any serious inquiry of a given topic outlaws "miscegenistic" interests, racial or otherwise.

But just when you thought we had all been carved up into our separate, segregated sub-divisions, rap comes to save us all. Dennis Romero writes in L.A.'s City Beat that black and white music are once again merging on the dance floor, as they haven't since the disco era gave birth to rap: "Today the most unstoppable element of electronic music in rap is ecstatic, Teutonic trance."

"Darling, would you turn the jazz off so I can focus on the music of your fingers on the keyboard?" my girlfriend asks. "Lying next to you typing is like getting a shiatsu massage."

And so, as a white man (Jerry Garcia) once sang, We bid you goodnight.

David Brooks got home one evening and discovered a copy of Wired. Or perhaps he surfed it on his laptop. By hook or by crook, he found on hard copy or online an article about "your outboard brain." It was written by a guy named Clive and it had all kinds of statistics about how our memories are getting shorter because of the Internets. "Ahah!" the columnist thought. He got out his pencil, or laptop. Several days later a column appeared in the Times under the title, "The outSOURCED brain." Clever switch! It was written by David Brooks.

South of David Brooks there lives a young man named Ezra Klein, a writing fellow for The American Prospect. He read the column and thought about his own life. "Utterly true," he remarked. "Google's like the brain I never had, the knowledge I never acquired. Its continued existence seems utterly implausible. But so long as it's around, I don't need to really read anything. I just need to catalogue the existence of things I might one day read.... I don't need the knowledge so much as a vague outline of what the knowledge is and how to get back."

He posted his view -- now weaving its way back toward Brooks (who, like every columnist, undoubtedly scans his own name on Technorati, or gets a direct feed from Google) -- opened up the discussion to commenters, and 100 readers piled on. "So true," wrote jambro. "I realized recently what a bad speller I had become since the dawn of Spell Check. And I even won a spelling bee when I was young!"

Then pblsh said something:

"This is completely wrong and Brooks has a motive here. Tools such as Google don't allow us to know less, they extend our capabilities. Google doesn't lessen our mental capacity, they expand it. Our minds aren't less 'full' (whatever that means) as he implies and you seem to go along with, because we have Google. It's an utterly unscientific consideration of how our minds work and relate to the world. It sounds reasonable, but it's wrong and insidious. There is a political point here, as always with Brooks. He is, at heart, anti-modern."

Except when it comes to ideas for his columns, which Brooks feels perfectly willing to outsource. And why not? He's the search-engine columnist: a Dogpile of derivative notions, firmly at home in the Great Age of Google, taking his ease in the era of collective intelligence.

Obama finally declared this weekend that he's going to start running for President of the United States instead of class president. (I'm paraphrasing.) And now a movement springs up from the liberal grassroots. I note Ben Smith's recent post on politico.com: the liberal effort to make a run at Hillary before it's too late, sparked by (full disclosure) my former classmate and fellow Yale Daily News editor, Glenn Hurowitz. We may have a race yet:

"A newly formed political action committee is aiming to stop Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary by calling into question her progressive credentials.

"We think there are other Democratic presidential candidates who are both more progressive and have a better chance of beating the Republicans than she does," said the president of Democratic Courage, Glenn Hurowitz.

He declined to tip his hand on the group's case against Clinton, but said the PAC plans a paid media campaign in the early primary states to make its position clear.

"We’ll definitely have sufficient resources to make a significant media buy," he said, adding that their campaign against Clinton would be "edgy" enough to get attention. "We don’t need to raise an immense amount of money to make a big difference."

Hurowitz, 29, is a Washington-based writer and activist. (He has written freelance Ideas articles for Politico, including this piece criticizing Clinton's and Obama's energy plans.) The group's two other officers are Sam Goldman and David Lipowicz, both of whom have worked for liberal and environmental groups in Washington."

On his blog, Hurowitz has this to say about Paul Wellstone:

"Unlike most politicians, Wellstone believed that election victories -- and even good governance -- flow not primarily from the people in office, but rather from the competing strength of the great movements that put them there."

John Edwards' campaign seems to be fading -- except in all-important Iowa -- but I keep thinking of the prescience of the words he wrote down on the back of a piece of paper by hand, while on the campaign trail in 2004: the Two Americas speech.

On the Two Americas beat this weekend, Matt Drudge leads with a ridiculous report about how, a thousand years from now, there will be two "breeds" of the human race: one seven or so feet tall, perfectly beautiful, with pert breasts, too. The other one looks like the Morlocks.

Now here's Mark Morford (or is it Morlock?), at SFGate, writing about a discussion he had with a longtime schoolteacher friend, which finally convinced him that yes, inequality is going to be a big problem in the United States:

"I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?"

As for the biggest inequality -- wealth and taxation -- here's Robert Reich:

"No candidate for president has suggested that the nation should raise the marginal tax rate on the richest beyond the 38 percent rate it was under Clinton (it’s now 35 percent, but the richest of the rich, as I’ll explain in a moment, are paying only 15 percent). Yet new data from the IRS show that income inequality continues to widen. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are earning more than 21 percent of all income (the data are from 2005, the latest the IRS has examined). That’s a postwar record. The bottom fifty percent of all Americans, when all their incomes are combined together, is earning just 12.8 percent of the nation’s income."

In tomorrow's N.Y. Times, the ever brilliant Guy Trebay calls Tila Tequila a working-class version of Paris Hilton -- each, in her own way, a modern-day Betty Boop. Trebay goes on to quote sociologist Josh Gamson on the democratization of fame in Internet America:

"Each has understood the wacko populism of the cybersphere and pitched her ambitions to capitalize on what Joshua Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America” calls “a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity .... Because of new technologies, we get to see now what happens when people have the option of making up their own celebrity."

Trebay takes it a step further, bringing in a class analysis:

"We’ve gone from dazed idolatry to another and more familiar form of identification. Fame, when not concocted by Hollywood and available to only the genetically gifted few, takes on softer contours. It becomes less an exalted state than a permeable one, available to those from classes and cohorts that, in the days of the studio monoliths, the gatekeepers of the star-making machine kept at bay."

Here's a link to "Why Guy Trebay is the Best Fashion Writer in the World," a January blog post from Book of Joe, the "world's most popular blogging anesthesiologist." Funny that Lisa Liebmann once wrote in Art Forum of his previous life as a Village Voice columnist: "His credo, expressed in the introduction, is a quote from the critic Wolfgang Binder, to 'pay homage to those who run the risk of leaving this earth unrecorded.'"

Roberta Smith on Damien Hirst's shark (now at the Met)—and on the skull, which would seem to be the ultimate perverse commentary on the state of the art world, its embodiment, or—why not?—both:

"The display advertises the Met's intention to be a player of sorts in the feeding frenzy surrounding the new and the next.

The shark is a symbol of the onset of this frenzy. Made on commission in 1991 for the collector Charles Saatchi, it is synonymous with the Y.B.A. art scene, from which descend, arguably and with some simplification, Mr. Saatchi's controversial ''Sensation'' exhibition, the Tate Modern, the Frieze Art Fair and the bustling London art market that the fair has fostered. (There have been no Y.B.A.'s like the first Y.B.A.'s, but never mind.)

If the shark is a beginning, perhaps the peak (and beginning of the downward spiral) is Mr. Hirst's latest controversial artwork, the diamond-encrusted platinum skull shown in London this summer. It seems like the perfect summation of our wasteful, high-priced, oblivious moment, an implicitly regal 21st-century equivalent of Cellini's gold saltcellar."

Skulls: so hot right now!

For a long time I've been meaning to read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's debut book, Random Family, the story of a circle of friends and lovers in the South Bronx whose fortunes rise and fall with a heroin ring, Boy George's Obsession. I finally picked up the book at the community bookstore in Cobble Hill, and it's the best journalism I've read in many years. In fact, I haven't been this carried away by a work of non-fiction since I picked up In the Spirit of Crazy Horse in middle school, or perhaps since I read The Power Broker. Like those books, LeBlanc's work is extremely detailed. Take, for example, this description of how a heroin operation works:

"Red, yellow, and green bulbs flashed from a homemade panel nailed to the floor. Upstairs, in another apartment, the dealer placed the tiny bags of heroin on a makeshift dumbwaiter and sent them down. The pitcher could only escape the first-floor apartment by going up: he was locked in during the shift, and sheet metal, pipes, and bars barricaded all the windows. Boy George briefed the pitcher. He didn't speak loudly but he explained the rules only once: 'If I look out the window and I could see a cop, I give it the yellow switch. You see it, and you slow down. If there's no movement in the upstairs apartment—no signals coming—you know something's up and you bum rush. Bum rush. If I hit the red switch, pack everything up, get in the dumbwaiter, and go. Green's green, dude. The material come down and the money go up. That's all you need to know, ready? Breakfast or lunch or dinner? We'll send a runner for a hero and one of those big, big Cokes."

But the best part is the way LeBlanc immerses herself in the lives of her subjects to tell, sympathetically yet objectively, the micro-history of their relationships with one another. There are so many ins and outs to this intricate story; each paragraph sheds as much light as a page in most journalism. Yet the story also unfolds simply, without adornment. Any journalist who aspires to "New New Journalism," wall-to-wall immersion journalism, or sociological culture-writing, should pick up this book, which, in my view, blows away its predecessors (sociological treatises on street-corner culture). Here is an interview with Adrian.

Do you ever have time to read anything anymore? Or are you "scanning darkly," to take (and reshape) a phrase from Richard Linklater. On his blog Watching the World Change, VF Editor of Creative Development David Friend presents a new way of measuring the condition of cultural refraction...

"I have a new theory, germinated just now. I call it Repurposing Calculus. In the mathematics of Repurposing Calculus, the above clip is a Derivative 4: four steps removed from the original media creation. It is a screen grab for a Website, taken from a Google video, recorded at a lunchtime talk, about a book. (Since the book is about media, it could arguably be recomputed as a Derivative 5. And if you email me a comment about the video, and I post it on this Website, together we could extend the chain to a Derivative 6 or 7.)

All of which is a way of warning: We are perpetually at a remove from the spark of creativity, writing not books but blog posts, reacting not to films but to reviews, hearing not symphonies but random iPod shuffles. Our synapses are hot-wired to synopses."

According to Repurposing Calculus, this blog post is hugely derivative --- a blog post about a blog post about a screen grab about a Google video, recorded at a talk about a book. Which was itself about images about a news event. According to my count, that makes D8. Who wants to take the next step?

Arianna Huffington in today's HuffPo:

"Too many Democrats seem resigned to the notion that, since they don't have the 60 votes needed to end Senate debate, their options on Iraq are limited. But the truth is, Democrats have all the votes they need to stop the war -- if they are willing to use the power given them by the Constitution to block any supplemental funding bill that doesn't includes a deadline for bringing the troops home. The prerogative to bring a funding bill to the House floor rests entirely with the majority -- which, in case Democrats have forgotten, is theirs. As for Senate Democrats, they would only have to find 41 votes to block the supplemental funding bill. I'm sorry for this refresher in Congressional Power 101, but Democratic leaders seem to need it."

The New York Times Book Review has a great article by the economist Robert Frank on
Robert Reich's new book, Supercapitalism. Reich says financial deregulation—and the ever larger role of investors in decisions like cutting costs and firing employees—lies behind the mounting economic inequality that has defined the last 30 years. He mentions an interesting stat: a typical boss, in the 70's, earned 30 times as much as his employees. Now he earns 300 times as much. Reich says it's not a moral issue; the problem is political. As Frank writes:

"Why hasn’t government stepped in? Again, Reich fingers greater competition as the culprit. Once some companies discovered they could gain an edge by influencing government decisions in their favor, rivals had little choice but to join the fray. And once some candidates began altering their votes to attract contributions, others faced strong pressure to follow suit. Reich documents in lurid detail the explosive growth of corporate lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions since the 1970s.

Can other institutions assume government’s abandoned role? Reich thinks not. Reliance on voluntary “corporate social responsibility,” he argues persuasively, is a pale substitute for effective laws against corporate misconduct. The only remedy, he concludes, is to purge corporate cash from the political system. This, of course, will be a tall order."

While the political system is certainly polluted with big money, it's pathetic how much we complain about that problem, attempt to solve it, and in the end get nothing done. Only a few years ago McCain and Feingold passed landmark legislation to get the money out of politics—legislation that took years pass the Senate. It was chewed up and torn apart by the courts, by which time all the corporations and interest groups had already found circuitous ways to beat the system, through state fund-raising organizations, and the like.

The dream of good government is largely a chimera. Governments exist on a range from more to less corrupt. When Roosevelt was elected and passed the New Deal that Reich praises (as does Paul Krugman in his new book, also reviewed in this week's Times) it wasn't because somehow his path to election had been miraculously cleared by clean-government legislation. In fact, the progressives of the previous generation had largely failed to reform government, and that is why the economy had spun out of control, making Roosevelt's victory possible.

Political windows open and shut. The potential for radical change occurs rarely—generally at the close of a period of failure, when the old way of doing business no longer seems adequate to the average person. The voter seeks new answers by necessity. We may be entering one such period today. But don't count on the new era beginning with a law to get the money out of politics. Reactionaries will always find ways to control the levers of government, and the only way to beat them is with an overwhelming majority. Wonky solutions by Beltway progressives only distract from the necessity of building a block-to-block political organization.

"Hundreds of Hipsters Tossed Out on Street," a blog called Queens Crap reports. The story describes a typical loft building by the Jefferson L stop (technically part of Ridgewood, Queens, but not far from the Morgan "Bushwick" stop) with wall-to-wall windows, sweeping views, and now a broken front door. Police busted in and kicked everyone out for "squatting"—at $1200 to $3600 a month—in a non-residential building. This is the second time in a week that a headline writer has thrown about the word "hipster" as a kind of punchline. I like it! On Oct. 12, the New York Post tried out the word on the front page, when a 26-year-old Brooklynite, Josh Drimmer, went a bit nuts and walked naked through Times Square, prompting the Post headline: "Hipster's 'Only in Nude York' Moment." The next day Drimmer fronted the Post again with the statement, "I'm not a hipster," delivered from his bed at Bellevue. Sure, kid.

Boston is the bloggiest city in the country—helped, in large part, by active tech and political industries, and campuses all about—closely followed by Philadelphia and ... Pittsburgh. New York places 6th, not bad for the biggest city (with much larger poor and computer-less areas) and two spots ahead of my hometown, Seattle, at #8. All this once again proves that Portland is actually the coolest city in th Northwest, home to the 5th bloggiest urban population in America and, of course, The Dandy Warhols. I found this story on outside.in, a useful web site that compiles stories from all kinds of sources—print, web, blog, etc—and creates a local news home page based on your zip code.

Six months ago, if Al Gore had won the Nobel Prize, I would have thought a draft-Gore movement would carry him to the nomination. Now, Hillary looks too strong to challenge. It isn't just that she's beating the pants off Obama and all the rest (helped in part by one million and one articles about John Edwards' haircut). She seems competent, strong, sure of herself (all male qualities!). Especially in contrast with her husband, she seems to possess a strong moral anchor and a firmness in the face of opposition. She's also a hawk.

There are parallels between Hillary and a man more often compared with her husband: Lyndon Johnson. Like Hillary, Johnson didn't look like a natural politician on television; he lacked the charisma of Kennedy. But he was the most brilliant politician of his generation behind closed doors. When he arrived in the Oval Office, he had the advantage of experience, and contacts to draw upon in the Senate, that helped him to seize the political opening created by Kennedy's murder and quickly pass legislation. Had it not been for his Achilles Heel — Vietnam — he could have been one of the greatest Presidents.

Gore has the advantage now of being unsullied by political involvement. Not only has he become an effective crusader on the single most significant issue of our times — global warming — he also has the backing of the peace wing of the party. He's been an effective advocate for change, but it's not clear to me how those skills will translate in the world of partisan politics, where he never truly felt comfortable, as Hillary so clearly does.

Today in the Nation, John Nichols tries to kick off the draft- Gore movement, telling Gore he HAS to run for President:

"Al Gore has arrived at the point that most politicians can only imagine in their wildest dreams. The entire world is asking him to be not merely a candidate but an ecological—not to mention, ideological—savior. And there is simply no question that he is viable. In fact, he is more viable than he has ever been.

Can Gore resist? Probably.

Should he resist? Probably not."

But an anonymous commenter, MASK, brings up the matter of political stomach...

"Unless he has good solid evidence that he could jump in in the next 2 weeks and ABSOLUTELY stomp Her Majesty WELL before the California and Florida primaries....he'd risk THE biggest embarassment [sic] of his life since he necked with Tipper at the 2000 Convention.

And of course the courage to risk that the Clintons don't have a secret "Gore silver bullet" file that they would use...leaked to Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal, with some juicy tidbits they gleaned from 8 years with Al as #2."

The man has sacrificed decades of his life already. And if a Democrat becomes President — particularly Hillary — Gore may be able to effect change from outside of office better than he ever could within. The reality is that, as much as people say they want "change," as much as we wish to be inspired by a Kennedy or for that matter an Obama, it may take an insider, warhorse type like Lyndon Johnson or Hillary Clinton to pass meaningful legislation.

Clive Thompson, who had a piece this summer on why New Yorkers live longer than other Americans (we walk), also blogs at www.collisiondetection.net. He has an excellent piece in this week's Wired on how our memories are wasting away as we come to rely more and more on machines. It's titled, "Your outboard brain knows all."

"This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

That reflexive gesture -- reaching into your pocket for the answer -- tells the story in a nutshell. Mobile phones can store 500 numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same info into your own memory? Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don't have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.

I've long noticed this phenomenon in my own life. I can't remember a single friend's email address. Hell, sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate's last name. Friends of mine space out on lunch dates unless Outlook pings them. And when it comes to cultural trivia -- celebrity names, song lyrics -- I've almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online."

Historian David Greenberg, who worked with Arthur Schlesinger on a biography of Calvin Coolidge, has waded through his voluminous journals in service of a fantastic review for the New York Sun. Schlesinger, it turns out, was not unlike today's New York bloggers in at least one way. While much talk has been made of his packed social schedule, he was not only a partygoer but also a social chronicler — ever ready with a pithy witticism, capable of underlining matters of public concern with the bedrock of personality. Lest we trivialize such private musings, Greenberg reminds, "It's to Schlesinger's credit that these entries come off not as dishy or petty but as measured; journals are, after all, the place where such thoughts ought to be recorded. It's a credit, too, to the historian's sons that they saw fit to publish the full range of their father's judgments of his friends."

There has been so much talk of eating local, lowering our carbon footprint, and the need to diminish our dietary reliance on corn that many people have entirely forgotten the single food issue that ignited the dining debate. But as George Wuerthner reminds us in "Behind the Bovine Curtain," an essay on Counterpunch, "While it's well and good to ask people to screw in fluorescent light bulbs to reduce energy demands, the single biggest change that anyone could do to immediately reduce their contribution to greenhouse gases is to eat less meat."

David Brooks weighs in today with a fascinating piece on "The Odyssey Years" — that moment between Prom and the dreaded 3-0 (college, post-college, and finally post-roommates), which Brooks calls a "new life phase" between adolescence and adulthood. Along the way, Brooks makes a strong point that I think marks the difference between Generations X and Y:

"The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives."

As I think about my friends between the ages of 20 and 26, it's true their aspirations are almost surprisingly traditional compared to those aged 27-35. There are few slackers in the Facebook generation compared to those born in the 70's, who grew up in the midst of the Reagan revolution, and always hoped the 90's would turn into the new 60's. (Hah!)

The economic realities that shaped the Clinton era — the creative wasting-away of old, mainline companies, the explosion of digital technology and the rise of the Internet, the increasing power of financial capital, the weakening of federal and even state government, the globalizing marketplace, and the rising import of the "fame game" in a 24-7 media environment — such trends led young people to crave success as fiercely as did that proverbial 50's drone, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. But young people today are seeking success in more independent ways rather than trying to climb the broken ladder of corporate careerism.

So what's driving this cultural change? We live longer, for one, and due to better exercise and dietary habits and medicine and Botox, we look younger too. And we live in a culture that idolizes youth — so what's the rush in growing up? Plus, no one wants to get married only to get divorced, and we know that half of all marriages end in just that. So why not wait a bit. As a result, we now see the emergence of a new period of life between adolescence and adulthood. Young people are not moving out and becoming "adults."

What we are witnessing here is the death of a mid-century model of middle-class behavior. It used to be that a regular guy or girl grew up, went to college, moved away, and established his or her own family. But many of those families didn't work out so well. Some were broken apart. People missed their parents and felt the lack of an elderly presence in their children's lives. Now the young middle class is beginning to question the point of flying away. Families are staying closer together, often bound by financial and residential assets, which had always remained the case with the upper and working classes anyway.

I wonder if, in a less stable and more entrepreneurial era, people may begin to hunger for some form of economic stability. Freedom is invigorating but frightening, too — or, as Janis Joplin once screamed, "just another word for nothing left to lose." Many corporations no longer provide something as fundamental as health care. If the government, too, ultimately fails to provide it, we may see the new crop of twentysomethings who now seem so free ultimately fall back on the most traditional means of staying afloat: the family. And as real-estate prices rise (at the moment a big IF), and as our parents live longer than their parents did, we may even see — in prosperous, high-rent areas at least — the return of the most traditional model of all: an extended family under one roof.