Love Is a Four-Letter Word Edited by Michael Taeckens Plume, 320 pp. Is there a worse time for love than late summer? It brings life’s most ugly breakups, followed by super-intense last-minute love affairs that in turn require even uglier breakups to extricate ourselves from. If it isn’t a random senior-year romance, it’s angry, drunken […]
Gerry Canavan
Posted inArt
A newand timelybiography of the man behind Blackwater USA
⇒ See related story, “What’s the difference between Blackwater’s Erik Prince and suspected terrorist Daniel Boyd?“ Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know […]
Posted inNews
Waste and cost raise doubts about nuclear power
When Barack Obama was campaigning for president, he unveiled an eight-page energy plan with progressive gestures toward renewables and conservation, green jobs and green technologies. Then, on page six, Obama dropped the n-bomb: “Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our noncarbon-generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals […]
Posted inArt
Dalton Conley laments our frantic existence and looks back fondly at the 1950s
Elsewhere, U.S.A. By Dalton Conley Pantheon, 240 pp. When my father was born in 1950, there were no iPhones, no BlackBerries, no Facebook, no iPods, no YouTube, no blogs, no broadband Internet, no digital cameras, no DVDs, no dial-up Internet, no Nintendos, no cell phones, no personal computers, no CDs, no Sony Walkmans, no VHS […]
Posted inNews
Man and myth: The flood of Lincoln books goes on
There are only, I think, three Americans whom it is impossible to criticize publicallyour national saints. One is Martin Luther King Jr., and the other two are presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. (In their own ways FDR and Reagan come close, but only for half the country each.) Given this, it’s no surprise that […]
Posted inNews
Jubilance: A crowd’s eye view of the Obama inauguration
Nobody was tired; nobody was cold. By the time we’d gathered our group and walked the two miles from my friend’s apartment in Virginia to the Lincoln Memorialmost of us wearing multiple layers of Obama T-shirts, I with my pajamas under my pants for extra warmthit almost seemed warm. We had woken up late, 7 […]
Posted inUncategorized
Life after (peak) oil
Oil no longer springs up from the ground like it does in the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbillies or in the halcyon 1900s of There Will Be Blood. And according to proponents of Peak Oil theory, which was seemingly confirmed in the early 1970s by the rapid drop-off in domestic oil production, the fuel […]
Posted inSports
Women have played amateur hockey in the Triangle for more than a decade
It’s only in the second period that the hockey game between the all-female Trailblazers and the all-male Ice Hawks starts to look a bit like a blowout. After a fierce first period and a beautiful last-minute shot that left the score 3-1 Trailblazers, both teams quickly score in the first three minutes of Period 2but […]
Posted inArt
Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us
“More and more, every story becomes an environmental story,” says journalist turned best-selling author Alan Weisman, explaining the origin of his 2007 book The World Without Us. “I’ve been looking at eco-disasters, the ozone hole over Antarctica, rainforests coming down in the tropics, things like Chernobyl…. There’s a cumulative sense you get, not just that […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Married N.C. State film professors enjoy parallel successes
There may be academic couples luckier than N.C. State University film professors Marsha and Devin Orgeron, but there probably aren’t many. It’s not just that they’ve both had professional success but that they’ve managed to hit their professional landmarks together. The two met as undergraduates at the University of California-Riverside; they were accepted into the […]