America’s great cities were left in economic free fall, with concentrated poverty, unemployment, high crime rates, failing public schools and severely deteriorating physical infrastructure, including roads, mass transit and parks. Academics and policy makers agreed that cities were irrelevant to America’s economic future; they would become places for poor minorities who could not afford to move to the suburbs. Urban policy became code for social-welfare policy.
More at Atlantic.
was sick a whole bunch last week. getting back in the swing of things.
You’ve heard that in 1991, literary agency Acton & Dystel typo’d the part of client Barack Obama’s bio that mentioned his place of birth. (They said it was Kenya).
If a story from WND can be believed, successor firm Dystel & Gooderich kept the mistake in their client’s profile up through April 2007, when it was then corrected.
I don’t have any reason to doubt that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. At some point or another, however, Barack Obama seems to have sanctioned the belief that he was born in Kenya, or allowed it to linger. What started as a mistake at Acton & Dystel in 1991 was allowed to remain in the narrative until after Obama started running for president.
It’s hard to believe that a Obama was unaware of the error for 16 years. For a young writer trying to sell a first book, “born in Kenya, successful in America,” was a much better hook than the truth.
Does it bother you that Obama seems to have let this error persist for so long? Not “bother” in the sense that it has you questioning his eligibility, bother in the sense that it has you questioning his character?
So says The New Yorker. John Cassidy on the ultimate dot-com.
I somehow missed this Klosterman/Gallagher Grantland interview from last fall but Noel’s in great form as usual. Timely for our purposes in the context of my recent suggestion, prompted by a Klosterman quote, that Axl Rose and Noel Gallagher cut some tracks together. A.V. Club’s Steven Hyden explores the place of Be Here Now in the Gallagher cannon given Noel’s suggestion that we play his career in reverse for an alternate narrative of artistic expectation.
Hyden gets close to saying what I’ve been saying for a while: Be Here Now is going to be one of those albums that people come back to and say, it’s not the first two Oasis albums, but it’s pretty great. It’s who they were then, and it’s who we, the people who loved it, were, too. Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory were almost perfect. Be Here Now was a victory lap that may have misfired, but it was a hell of a lot of fun, and it made sense that the biggest band in the world (“the first post-grunge band to be massive in every way,” as Klosterman says) act the part. And they did. And that record got me through my senior year of high school. I’ll always love it.
(From The Displaced Person)
55 and MCA.
Chris Cocca 