Journalism

It’s not hard to understand what Bill Ayers and his friends in the Weather Underground were thinking in the early 1970s, when they made plans to bomb the Capitol and other sites. The Vietnam War was raging, Nixon was president. The American people were so distracted by the media, or blinded by ideology, or bought off by consumerism that they would never wake up; except, that is, for Bill Ayers and his friends. They saw what was going on. . . . ”
Review of Bill Ayers’ “Public Enemy”: continued at the LA Review of Books HERE

Jon Wiener: The star of your new book [Dissident Gardens] is Rose Zimmer, the “Red Queen of Sunnyside” in the 1950s—you also call her “the Last Communist,” in capital letters. Where did you get Rose?

Jonathan Lethem: The mystery I was trying to explore was my grandmother’s political dark matter. As a kid, by the time I knew her she wasn’t talking about these things. But there was a famous photo of her in Life magazine in 1938 marching against Hitler in Manhattan. She was very proud of this photo, and it was an indication that she had been an activist and had lived the life of a dissident.
. . . continued at The Nation, HERE.

It doesn’t happen very often that a leading critic calls on a university press to withdraw and then reissue a corrected version of a scholarly book. But it’s happening now—the book is The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand; the publisher is Harvard University Press, and the critic is David Denby of The New Yorker . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

What was Gloria Allred thinking when she agreed that rape victims at Occidental College, in exchange for a cash settlement,  should be barred from campus activism?
story at TheNation.com HERE.

Remembering 9/11: My Q&A with Joan Didion, one week after 9/11, about American political rhetoric, and her own experience that day.  “”People are talking about America losing its innocence. How many times can America lose its innocence?”
at the LA Review of Books HERE, and Salon.com, HERE.

“Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West”—that story in The New York Times on September 5 reported that “many rebels have adopted some of the same brutal and ruthless tactics as the regime they are trying to overthrow.” The dilemma: how can we punish Assad for his violations of international law, when his opponents are also in violation—in this case, killing prisoners?
. . . contuned  at TheNation.com, HERE.

The quest continues among venture capitalists to find the next Facebook, the next Google, the next eBay—and the Silicon Valley hype machine is suggesting that it might be Coursera, the “leader of the pack” among companies trying to make money with massive open online courses, or MOOCs.  . . . continued at The Nation, here

A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled August 29 that the Department of Veterans Affairs has been violating federal law by leasing land on its West LA campus for a hotel laundry, movie set storage, a baseball stadium for UCLA and a dog park. The lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of Southern California . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

I met ELMORE LEONARD, who died on August 20 at age 87, only a couple of times, interviewing him on his book tours, but he was a memorable guy, totally unpretentious about his massive accomplishments. . .

Q&A with Elmore Leonard, from 2000, at LA Review of Books, HERE  and at Salon.com, HERE.

Q.  How did you feel when you first heard the news that the Supreme Court had overruled DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act that had defined marriage as limited to two people of the opposite sex?
Dan Savage: I’m morbid, so my first thought was ‘I can die now.’
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE