OK, so I got a Kindle. This is a major step, for someone who is as much of a book junkie as I am. Actually, more like a book magnet. And after decades of buying books, they add up. Especially since I’m a packrat, as Mrs W never tires of pointing out, and living in a flat with limited space, it leads to books three deep in the bookshelves, that sort of thing. Of course, there’s the occasional cull, but that just clears out space for a while that fills up again. Then there’s the feeling that while I’m not likely to read any Dan Brown ever again—once was enough—there’s still no reason to believe that a single tree should ever be sacrificed for a Dan Brown book, as Mrs W once commented. Elitist, I know, but there it is.

So I thought about this for a while, and a couple of years ago we borrowed one for a long weekend from the son-in-law, and Mrs W really liked it, but that was in the US, and for a while there the availability of titles in the UK was pretty sparse. Full story »

Two flimsy gray walls, three filing cabinets and one rarely used dry-erase board make up the landscape of my work cubicle. My mind travels often to places I have been and those I long to see, yet this is the daily scenery starving my adventurous soul.

I used to love my job. That was before it became three positions in one.

Since corporations began laying off millions during the economic crisis several years ago, there’s a phrase that’s became all-too-common. Somebody complains about work. Somebody else replies that, “At least you have a job.” Full story »

Sixth in a series

by Michael Pecaut

On Friday, I was one of the million or so people to see the launch of STS-135 live. More than that, I was one of the lucky few to see it from the parking lot of the VAB, 3.4 miles away from launch pad 39A. That might seem like a long way, but trust me, you don’t want to be much closer than that.

Surrounded by NASA workers yammering about previous launches, high school students and undergrads yammering about the next party, and camera nuts yammering about f-stops and shutter speeds, I waited for hours, unwilling to give up my spot on the pavement. No time for eating. No time for the restroom. We weren’t going anywhere. Full story »

Can the Republicans really be so desperate for another candidate named George that they’re considering Pataki, who’s not particularly conservative and three years older than the New Madrid earthquake?  Seriously?

It’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s some Bush acolyte out there we don’t know about yet who will enter at some point. Full story »

Ellen pulls the sweater tight around her, feels the strength of the wind begging her to let go, embrace the brisk cold of this November night.  Three twenty in the morning and she knows this is not where she should be.  She should be wrapped up in a blanket next to Steven, sharing body heat, love.  Any chance of that is still hours away, home two towns over, down I-70, and looking at the blacktop of the McDonald’s parking lot, it feels like forever.

“We don’t shit where we eat.”  That’s what Steven had told her when they had started three months ago.  He had heard it in some mobster movie, the title lost to dead memory cells.  He told her this, and his plan, armed robbery, and how they were going to make it safely, do everything right.  “This is only temporary,” he’d told her.

Behind her, Steven sat in the blue Civic, waiting for the McDonald’s door to open, at which point he’d drive forward, headlights off, and idle the engine until she came back out, like he had so many times, their routine almost clockwork. Full story »

Fifth in a series

by Evan Robinson

Thirty years ago last April, six of us set out from Lake Geneva, WI, in two cars. We had told our bosses that we were taking a few days off to see Columbia’s first launch. Lawrence, his wife Josie, and Jeff were in Lawrence and Josie’s car. Erol, Paul, and I were in mine.

Disclaimer

I’ll say, right from the beginning, that many of the routine details of the trip are hazy now. I couldn’t consult photos, because they’re all in storage. I don’t remember the route we drove, although I suspect that we went from Lake Geneva through Indianapolis, Louisville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Gainesville, Orlando to somewhere near Cocoa, just inland from Cape Canaveral, following I-65 and I-75. It’s likely that some of the sharp memories of the trip are just as hazy as well. But everything here is as I remember it, with some support from Google. Full story »

Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor is, along with other episodes such as the Six-Day War and Operation Entebbe, is the stuff of Israel’s military legend. Some are citing it as a precedent for attacking Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities. As Bennett Ramberg wrote in 2006 for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (behind a pay wall) about the Osirak attack’s applicability to Iran:

A dramatic military action to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, the June 7, 1981 strike left a legacy that echoes today in the “all options are on the table” drumbeat emanating from Washington and Jerusalem. The seemingly straightforward message to Iran and other would-be proliferators: Abrogate nonproliferation pledges in this post-9/11 era and risk being “Osiraked.” Full story »

Here at S&R we try and generate as much original content as possible and, unlike a lot of blogs, we don’t dedicate much energy to linking other stories around the ‘sphere. Aside from Mike’s Nota Bene series, anyway. But earlier today three other outlets linked to my “Will you vote for Obama (again)?” piece, and since these places are trying to broaden what I think is a critical discussion for our nation, I thought I’d take a moment to say thanks and encourage S&R’s reader to backtrack with us.

• First, thanks to the supreme Susie Madrak, who gets the empathy with which we deliberate the question far better than most people. I can’t recommend her site highly enough. Full story »

Fourth in a series

As a child turning teen in the late 1950s, the black-and-white RCA in the living room received only three channels … well, four, but we didn’t watch PBS. So I read. Newspapers, of course (after Dad finished sports and Mom finished news). And books. The library was only two blocks away, so I spent afternoons there sampling the stack. I was a small-town boy at the end of the idyllic “Father Knows Best” decade of Eisenhower placidity, a geeky kid feeling the first pangs of puberty.

I longed for adventure beyond being a Boy Scout or tossing a football with neighborhood pals. In the library I found adventure stories set in space, spun with well-chosen words and exquisitely crafted plots.

I discovered Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.” Then Robert A. Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Empire.” Science fiction (or, in Clarke’s case, science prediction) captivated me. I became a sci-fi cognoscente.

Then, in 1957, came the shocker: Sputnik. Full story »

One of my political lists broke out into an impassioned and occasionally contentious debate yesterday over a basic question: do you plan on voting for Obama in 2012? (Actually, the original phrasing was more along the lines of “how could you possibly vote for Obama in 2012?”)

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the conduct of Mr. Obama’s first term, it isn’t hard to understand where the question comes from.

• He has continued Bush’s wars.
• He has failed to close Gitmo, as promised.
• Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Don’t ask.
• Race to the Bottom (or, let’s take Bush’s dumbass No Child Left Untested and double down on “accountability”).
• He led the handover of trillions of dollars to the financial institutions that created the largest financial crisis since the Depression.
• He has reasserted the government’s right to torture.
• And now he stands on the brink of bargaining away Medicare and Social Security to the Koch Brothers’ towelboys in Congress.

Full story »

This just keeps getting better and better. Alexander Cockburn is right—this is just like Watergate. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news. The iconic hate figure, a man who pretty much singlehandedly created a global media empire against very significant odds, which in any other context might be seen as plucky and admirable in some way, but who wrecked that accomplishment through political blowback once some transparency revealed the depths to which members of his organization would go. (There’s that whole Fox News thing too, for good measure.) The scuttling of politicians for cover, or at least better defensive positions. And a few heroes popping up, occasionally from unexpected quarters.

So what’s happened since our last update? Well, what hasn’t happened? Except for Rebeka Brooks’s resignation, which Rupert has said is not gonna happen. We’ll see—some folks are giving it until Wednesday. In other expected and unexpected developments, Andrew Coulson, former News of the World editor and former press advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, has been arrested, question, and released. Full story »

Jeff Jarvis, scion of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, took issue with my Twitter response expressing the belief that newspaper buyers are complicit in the actions of newspaper producers (wrt to News of the World, for our American readers).  He took it further in a blog post, “Readers are our Regulators.”

I disagree. If the public are good regulators then I assume you would accept that the public would have Casey Anthony found guilty even though a court of her peers found differently? The “court of public opinion” isn’t always wise or informed.

Making difficult and appropriate, but socially unpopular, decisions is part of the idea of justice. Full story »

by Samantha Berkhead

Author: King Abdullah II of Jordan
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.: New York, 2011

It seems oddly prophetic that Jordan’s King Abdullah II published his first book when he did. Our Last Best Chance, a memoir pressing the need for peace in his region of the world, was released just as Tunisia’s revolutionary uprising blazed a trail for the Arab Spring of 2011—-a wave of citizen protests washing across the Middle East, the full implications of which remain frustratingly veiled to many.

From Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Bill Clinton’s My Life, books authored by state leaders usually get published while they are not in the position of power for which they’re known. This trend makes Abdullah’s book all the more intriguing—-Our Last Best Chance was written and published just over 10 years into his reign. Full story »

Third in a series

STS-1: Columbia

Full story »

In case you missed it, the US women just overcame an officiating debacle of Coulibalian proportions to beat Brazil in penalty kicks. Hope Solo, I love you. Call me.

If you’re like me, you appreciate it when musicians work to innovate, to come up with cool new sounds and things that we haven’t heard before. But there’s that old saying: “there is nothing new under the sun,” and that goes double for music. Even the best and most creative artists are really just synthesizing old influences in novel ways, right?

Sometimes we get movements that are heavy on the revivalist, though, and in the past few years we’ve seen a real doozy in all the various iterations of Neo-Soul. Honestly, some of the acts are ethically little more than Holiday Inn cover bands, but damn damn, damn, the best of these bands are just fantastic, even if you think you’ve heard it all before. Full story »

She didn’t remember me when we met again.

It was at a tiny club in San Cristobal de Las Casas. Her boyfriend, Lucas, had offered to buy me a Bohemia, and in exchange I was enduring a well-rehearsed diatribe on the evils of NAFTA. That’s when she sat down. Her name, it turned out, was Marietta, with a soft “a” – Mar, like the sea in Spanish. She was taller than I remembered, muscular, and her eyes were a pale, stony gray. Her dirty blonde dreadlocks were tied back loosely, and she had an unconventional, audacious kind of beauty.

There was small talk. In the background a local band belted out reggae covers of Pink Floyd and Nirvana. She told me she was a filmmaker, and I feigned familiarity with her PBS documentary. I asked her where she was from.

“Pretty much everywhere,” she replied. “How about you?”

“Everywhere else,” I said.

“Tyler was born here,” Lucas interjected, apparently to impress Marietta, “and he went to Berkley.” Full story »