“Congratulations, Class of 2014, you’re totally screwed”…. The average student-loan borrower graduating in 2014 is $33,000 in debt, according to the Wall Street Journal—the highest amount ever. And a new study of public universities shows that student debt is worst at schools with the highest-paid presidents. .. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE
Q. Did you always want to write a menopause book?
A. Isn’t that every girl’s dream?
. . . continued at The Nation, HERE
August 8 will be the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. That’s a good target date for the long-overdue appointment of a new director of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. The library has been without a director for two and a half years, ever since the departure of Timothy Naftali in 2011. . .
… continued at TheNation.com HERE
Q. You do live shows all over the place. What’s it like to do your left-wing live show in a right-wing state like Alabama?
A. I’ve been to Alabama twice this year. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve yet to find a place in America that’s so backward I can’t find two or three thousand screaming liberals to come out on a Friday night and cheer for the blue team. I think they’re gratified to look around the room and see so many people who they didn’t realize live in their area and think like they do.
. . . . continued at The Nation, HERE
For more than a century, May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day. It’s a national holiday in more than eighty countries. But here in the land of the free, May 1 has been officially declared “Loyalty Day” by President Obama. It’s a day “for the reaffirmation of loyalty”—not to the international working class, but to the United States of America.
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Q. The last wave of extinctions came when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and their world. What’s different about the species extinction that threatens now?
A. Scientists say now we’re the asteroid. This extinction event is unique because it’s being caused by a living thing
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Jon Wiener: Donald Rumsfeld grins a lot in your movie “The Unknown Known.” The most memorable thing about this film is his grin. What do you make of it?
Errol Morris: Supreme self-satisfaction. Cluelessness. Inability to deal with the reality of what he’s done.
continued at The Nation, HERE or HERE
Mickey Rooney, who died April 6, had many fans, including 10-year-old Gore Vidal. “What I really wanted to be,” Vidal wrote in his memoir Point to Point Navigation, “was a movie star: specifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney.” The inspiration? Not the “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” musicals Rooney made for MGM with Judy Garland—it was his role as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and released in 1935, when Rooney was 14. “I wanted to play Puck, as he had,” Vidal recalled.
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE
Peter Matthiessen, the legendary writer who died April 5, had one of his most important books withdrawn from publication for seven years as a result of attacks by government officials and the cowardice of his publisher, Viking Penguin.
It’s a story overlooked in many of the obits. Published in 1983, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse provided a passionate and solidly documented account of the events that culminated in a 1975 gun battle on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota between FBI agents and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) that left two agents and one Indian dead. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE.
Jon Wiener: A lot of what you’ve written celebrates “the golden age of promiscuity” in 1970s New York. That seems at odds with the gay marriage movement today.
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Edmund White: First, I was opposed to gay marriage because it seemed like one more way that gays were wanting to assimilate. When I realized the Christian right was so opposed to it, as well as tyrannical governments in Africa and Russia, I thought, “It must be a good thing to fight for.” Now I have a confession to make: I got married in November to my friend Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with for nineteen years. At least we didn’t rush into it.
… continued at http://www.thenation.com/article/179032/qa-edmund-white