If you’ve been off-planet for the last few months you may have missed the news: Jon & Kate have split, and in the process migrated from the relative banality of the TV listings over to the hyper-banality of the tabloids. I’m still not sure what the future holds for the popular “reality” show, but whatever it is, Gosselin family 2.0 equals Jon minus Kate.

It occurs to me that these events represent something significant in our culture. Since about 1980 or so we’ve been in one of our periodic “childrens is the most preciousest things in the whole wide world” phases. (For more on the generational cycles that produce this dynamic, see Generations, 13th Gen and Millennials Rising by William Howe and Neil Strauss, two men whose work I have referenced a number of times in the past.) In the previous generation (Gen X), children were an afterthought for most parents, who had been socialized in far more self-centric times. Full Story »

Before it was dredged and cleared for flood control, Rock Creek cut a pristine path through the heart of Lewisburg. Well, maybe pristine isn’t the proper adjective for a flowing body of sludge that had a more scatological name than the one the maps gave it, but it was close enough to the Park for us to consider it our personal creek. There were crawdads aplenty down there, and frogs and turtles and large blackish things that might have been rats. Rock Creek was also prone to washing away the occasional carnival from the empty lot on Second Avenue, giving rise to infrequent sightings of gigantic pythons and rogue clowns, but we considered this a small price to pay for being able to fish two blocks from home. Full Story »

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. Full Story »

Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full Story »

Today is the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that famously became known as “the day the music died.”

For those not consigned to the generational hell that is Baby Boomerdom, on this day 50 years ago a small plane carrying three important rock stars of their time – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson – crashed in a snow storm.

All three men died, as did the pilot, a 21 year old with, evidently, about 30 minutes of flying experience.

There has been much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the years due to this event. Full Story »

After a short walk from the light rail I was greeted by an empty P.O. box. A couple blocks north, I was greeted by a copy of the Post/News Duopoly’s jobs page, dated October 2008. “‘The fuck is this?!” I asked myself audibly as I flung the page onto the ground and kept on. At the 7-11 on 3rd/Broadway I bought a Lotto quick pick and a Powerball reject that was laying on the machine. After an uneventful lunch a couple blocks from there, I made the decision to cross the following intersection, one of the most dangerous I’ve encountered in Denver:

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The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »

In the past I’ve written about a variety of generational issues, and have often focused on the Millennials. At times I’ve been construed as dogging them pretty hard. As I’ve tried to explain, my criticisms of them (for being entitled, for lacking critical thinking skills, etc.) haven’t really been criticisms of them, per se – a cohort that’s 75-100 million strong doesn’t get to be a certain way all by itself. The blame, if we want to use that word, falls on those responsible for educating and developing the generation.

Further, some have erroneously interpreted my critiques as somehow suggesting that my generation – X – was without flaw. Which, of course, is ridiculous. Every generation has its relative strengths and weaknesses, and X has been a trainwreck in some respects.

All of which leads me to the other morning, when fellow scrogue Brian Angliss forwarded along the link to a Washington Post column from Neil Howe, the man who co-authored, along with William Strauss, the finest series of works on America’s generations I’ve ever encountered. Full Story »

Running and writing may be polar opposite activities.

Writing requires long sedentary hours of deep thought; running, by its very nature, typifies motion, yet most runners don’t spend their time thinking about much of anything in particular as they run.

Both activities require solitude, although a runner may race with hundreds of other entrants and a writer requires an audience.

So perhaps running and writing seem like odd bedfellows for a book, but then again, Haruki Murakami has made his reputation by stretching boundaries and asking readers to look at the world in different ways.

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, takes a different approach than his usual fiction. Running is a memoir about the two things in Murakami’s life that best define him. Murakami tries to get inside his own head to explain the appeal, and the importance, of running and how that impacts his work as a writer. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor,” Murakami explains. Full Story »

As I was walking down the 16th Street Mall this afternoon, I passed a woman wearing a button that said “Ask Me How Many Houses I Own.” It’s amazing how quickly a creative entrepreneur can turn something into a marketable opportunity, even a political gaffe.

McCain’s deeply regrettable admission has been the subject of many a comment, criticism and joke here around the DNC this week, to no one’s surprise. But what has surprised me was another McCain gaffe that’s gotten far less press, yet which also provides major evidence for how far removed he is from the daily world of the people he seeks to govern. I’m speaking of his admission a few weeks ago that he does not use the Internet and had never sent an e-mail.

I’ve heard apologists argue that it’s a generational thing; he’s 72. My mom is 69, and she’s never sent an e-mail either. But she’s not running for president. Full Story »

As a Democratic woman, I breathed a big sigh of relief last night. Hillary did what she needed to do.

She stepped up with class and grace when the moment demanded it. Plenty of Democrats were nervous as they entered the Pepsi Center last night, and a camera cut to Mchelle Obama’s face as her husband’s one-time rival started speaking indicated she might have been among them. But Clinton quickly allayed doubts with an unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama as “my candidate,” which elicited cheers amid a sea of bobbing signs proclaiming “Obama” and “Unity.”

It was a poignant occasion for Hillary supporters, and even women like me who have been on board with Obama since the beginning. Full Story »

I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty. He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.

— Rush Limbaugh on presidential candidate Barack Obama; Mr. Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Premiere Radio Networks and Clear Channel Radio, which will pay him more than $400 million; Mr. Limbaugh once referred to Sen Obama and actor Halle Berry as “Halfrican American” on the Jan. 24, 2007, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show; July 6.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

— former senator Phil Gramm, one of presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic advisers, likening the nation’s economic problems to a “mental recession“; July 10.
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We were just having fun making posters. There was no time to think about what we were doing. It was a furious time, but I think most great art is created in a furious moment.

— Stanley Mouse, artistic partner of Alton Kelley; the pair created hundreds of classic psychedelic rock posters and threw “the world’s first psychedelic dance-concerts at Longshoreman’s Hall in September 1965, essentially starting the San Francisco scene”; Mr. Kelley died this week at age 67; June 3.

When it comes to issues like this, [corporations] don’t want to be anywhere near them and they will cave very, very quickly — anything to stop the pain, anything to stop the press from calling.

— Eric Dezenhall, the head of the crisis public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, on Dunkin’ Donuts’ decision to remove an ad from its Web site featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after conservative bloggers complained her scarf resembled a keffiyeh, labeling it “jihadi chic“; May 30.
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It’s often difficult to get the attention of my students. But when I told them that it’s possible that a few of them would see the year 2100, and that most of their children surely would, they stopped furtively texting under their desks and began paying attention.

When I was born just after World War II, I told them, the population of the United States was about 141 million; of the world, about 2.7 billion. Now, 62 years later, Americans tip the scale at about 303 million; the world’s population has grown to about 6.6 billion.

A little extrapolation of U.S. Census data, I told them, shows the American population hitting 518 million at mid-century and 758 million in 2100. The world’s population is likely to grow to 14 billion at century’s end. Imagine what that world — their world — would be like, I challenged them.

But I was too optimistic. In a report to be released today, a Virginia Tech professor estimates that between 2100 and 2120 the population of the United States will reach one billion people.
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Part one in a series.

During its 36-year run, LIFE Magazine traversed a period of technological innovation and peril unsurpassed in the recorded history of humanity. As the first issue was released in November of 1936, a resurgent Germany was constructing the most awesome war machine the world had yet seen, a development that literally threatened the very future of the hemisphere. LIFE’s final issue went to press at the end of 1972, roughly three weeks after NASA’s last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17, closed the books on a program that proved — theoretically, at least — that humanity was not inevitably bound to this planet.

The technological distance between these two moments is mind-boggling. Full Story »

If it was the Marlins, you wouldn’t see people in Florida getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was the Yankees — well, their fans aren’t real. They just buy the hat.

— Helio Rocha, a restaurant manager who stayed up all night in anticipation of watching the Red Sox’ Major League Baseball opener (played in Toyko) at 5:30 a.m. in famed Boston watering hole Cask ’n’ Flagon; March 26.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

— from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Dealbook” column in The New York Times; March 25; emphasis added.
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Back in 2001 the US Fed was considering the very real risk that the US government would be able to pay off their entire national debt. The government had been running a fiscal surplus for five years and was projected to continue with this to 2010. It was this which underpinned George W Bush’s (then recently elected) $1.3 trillion tax cut.

Why worry about paying off all the debt? Well, the Fed controls money supply by using dollars to buy the bonds which the US government issues to cover its debt. No debt, no bonds … and the Fed had to consider new ways of controlling money supply.

At the time then Fed Governor, Alan Greenspan, would rather that additional capital went to prepare the US economy for the pressure to be placed on it through obligations in Social Security and – especially – Medicare. Full Story »

What’s the difference between a skeptic and a cynic?

A skeptic is someone who, when told something, doesn’t immediately believe it to be true and looks deeper into the issue before making their decision.

A cynic is someone who, when told something, automatically assumes it to be false, and doesn’t bother looking any further, because it’s just got to be bullshit.

It’s essential, especially in these times of fear and paranoia, that we maintain a healthy skepticism about what we are told. Full Story »

There is a very important man in human history whose name too few people know:  Alfred Korzybski.  He’s the father of general semantics, and before you say to yourself, “Oh, it’s only semantics,” understand that improper use of semantics can absolutely, positively, kill you.  I’ll explain why, shortly.

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Hello. My name is Jim Booth and I’m (at least nominally) a writer for S&R. For those of you vaguely familiar with my work and wondering where I’ve been, here’s a brief explanation of sorts.

It’s been a rough couple of months.

On the blogging front, the two “big” stories I spent most of 2007 writing about, the evil that is Blackwater and the Jena 6 travesty of justice, are gone from the news cycle. In the first case Blackwater coverage is now buried – by, I suspect, tacit agreement between the Bush junta and corporate media – so as to allow Erik Prince and company to slither away with minimal (if any) punishment for their crimes against humanity in the name of protecting “American interests” in Iraq. In the second case, Jena’s impetus toward equal treatment under law has dissipated (sadly) due to revelations that the principal prosecutee/cause célèbre has been something of a habitual criminal whose previous unsavory behavior had been excused with wrist taps for the following reasons: 1) he was a star athlete; 2) he committed his crimes against fellow African-Americans rather than against whites in his home town in the deep south. Full Story »