SACRAMENTO — After the housing bubble burst a few years
ago, sending real estate prices to the floor in many places, some
influential academics and urban planners celebrated the supposed
demise of something they had always hated: the suburbs.
In their v...
The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was
Superman.
It was December 1978 and my family was in Victoria, British
Columbia for my Dad’s sabbatical. I was six-years old and was
absolutely captivated by the whole spectacle. Everything was large
tha...
My friend Happy Jack Feder lived in Missoula, Montana, in the
early 1980s in the same neighborhood as the writer Dorothy Johnson,
who lived in a small house on Dearborn Avenue. Johnson was retired
from teaching by then, but had worked in the English Depar...
Amid all the heated cross-currents of debate about the National
Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, there is a growing
distrust of the Obama administration that makes weighing the costs
and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to asse...
The Obama administration has reached the unenviable stage in
which it’s almost impossible to determine where one scandal ends
and another begins.
The most recent case in point is President Obama’s decision to
kinda sorta intervene in the Syrian civil...
Conservative
politicians in the modern world generally despise their own voters.
They need them at election time, but they do not enjoy meeting
them, and find their views on morals, migration, education, and
crime embarrassing. This is a problem only when...
Despite his evident reluctance to take America into the Syrian
civil war, President Barack Obama appears to be traveling down that
road step-by-step. He has decided the U.S. will provide weapons to
the insurgents. If that action fails to transform the con...
“Wooly Bully,” the famous hit of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs,
was recorded almost fifty years ago. It begins with the bland
assertion, “Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.” But today, the
mere existence of that innocent sounding conversation...
Remember the power ballad? It was a subgenre of rock music
pioneered by Boston in 1976 and Styx a year later. From
near-symphonic beginnings in “More Than a Feeling” and “Come Sail
Away,” the power ballad elbowed its way to prominence in the early...
The
ShahBy Abbas
Milani(Palgrave Macmillan, 496 pages, $18
paperback edition)
The Islamic Republic of Iran has elected a “moderate” successor
to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, infamous for his threat-laced
apocalyptic rhetoric. All the candida...
