Express
Hyderabad Calling
By Christian Parenti, with photos by Jessica DimmockThe Indian night is suffocatingly hot and the curving streets of old Hyderabad are dark and quiet. On a small little hill nearby, a dilapidated Hindu temple wears strings of yellow bulbs. A few motorbikes and rickshaw cabs are pulled up to a dimly lit tea stall.
FORECLOSURES: A Legal Racket
By Jason Flores-WilliamsEvery morning since I’ve set up my little law practice here in Santa Fe, I’ve gotten absolutely terrified phone calls from Northern New Mexicans about to lose their homes to foreclosure.
WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN”
By Brian EdgarWe simply need to build more charter schools, get rid of lazy and incompetent teachers, create accountability regimes and—oh yeah—hire better teachers. But, first we need to get rid of the archaic bureaucracies and unions that protect these cretins.
Twain and Trane
By Theodore HammOther than their iconic status in the world of letters and notes, Mark Twain and John Coltrane seem entirely remote from one another. One was a writer and the other a saxophonist.
In Conversation
Is Publishing Doomed? JOHN B. THOMPSON with Williams Cole
By Williams ColeOver the last decade there has been much talk about the fracturing, transformation, implosion, and even the annihilation of the dominant paradigms in music, journalism, movie-making, and, most recently, publishing. What might have been a slow burn in a once-stable media landscape is on the verge of ashing out, as book publishing is now seen by many as the last victim of such a “crisis.
The Last Real Populist
By Robert Hamm1948 was an exciting, and eventually stunning year, in American politics. A united G.O.P., which hadn’t won a presidential election since 1928, was confident that its nominee, New York Governor Thomas Dewey, could handle the beleaguered President Truman, whose Democratic Party had begun to fracture.
Moulitsas vs. The Fundamentalists
By Michael TerryIn American Taliban, author Markos Moulitsas, founder of the left-wing weblog Daily Kos, attempts to highlight what he considers to be important similarities between America’s radical right and the Islamic fundamentalists with whom they have been waging a war with for the past decade.
Hyde's Gravity
By Christopher MichelBooks in general are vital, of course, to a well-lived life. Any given book may be instructive, entertaining, engaging, or distracting.
A Family Affair
By Lester PimentelIn Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life, from LBJ to Obama, Brown University historian James T. Patterson argues the heightened racial polarization of the time distorted a report whose insights have proved painfully prescient.
All Ears
By Allen WilcoxGiddy clauses, sonorous exposition, tart and tangy descriptors clustered like grapes across the latticework of his paragraphs: if you want to read what’s best in contemporary music journalism, you must perforce encounter the work of Alex Ross.
STEWARD’S NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
By David RosenIn the decades following the nation’s third sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s (following those of the 1830s-1840s and 1910s-1920s), sexual practices once ignored or derided by many Americans, such as the female orgasm and homosexuality, became part of mainstream culture.
