Clancy Martin. How to Sell. FSG. May 2009.

Mark Rudd. Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. William Morrow. April 2009. 

Naomi S. Baron. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford UP. March 2008.

Henry Jenkins. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press. August 2006.

Lee Siegel. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Spiegel & Grau. January 2008.

Dilip Hiro. Inside Central Asia. Overlook. May 2009.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué: 1936–2008

Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. Knopf. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. (Library of America, No. 188.) Library of America. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Complete Novels. (Library of America, No. 189.) Library of America. March 2009.

John, your reputation in American literature is very, very shaky. God knows what will happen to it. —Jean Stafford to Cheever in 1978

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Walter Kirn. Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever. Doubleday. May 2009.

He'd felt it slipping away with every passing week. He only had another three months, four at most, to amount to something. Striding, sliding almost, in a frenzy of purposelessness down the street, he looked straight ahead, eyes narrowed, clutching groceries bought in panic, nothing he could actually eat (a lime, some broccoli). He needed to get back and sit at a table, clear it and clean it, then sit at it, straight-backed, focused. It was this tedious necessity of going out, buying produce, eating, which was holding him back. And then all the endless cleaning, and the sudden fear of what would happen if he did not speak to other people for days on end. Would he forget how the world was? He'd stopped reading the news. He knew nothing. He paused, contemplated in the cold, then walked in to a small convenience store. He needed table polish. Read More

School #2 in Yoloten, Turkmenistan, was built in 1931, right as the first exiles began arriving from the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine. I know this because I worked at school #2 for eighteen months, and because Renata Aleksevich, school #2's gym teacher, would tell me this sort of thing, hand-rolling his makhorka cigarettes and trying to figure out what an American was doing in what is still sometimes referred to locally as a corner of the Gulag. Yoloten had largely been built and populated by Ukrainians and Armenians, Tatars and Georgians and Azeris—osobeiye izganniki, special exiles sent to Central Asia during the upheavals of the USSR. It was sometimes suggested in Yoloten that I, too, must have been exiled to end up there. This wasn't exactly true, but my job there was at times difficult to understand.

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It's a little sad to see GM dying just the way they lived. Their latest death throe is called the "Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility," an incredibly awkward name designed to yield the acronym P.U.M.A. The PUMA is a two-seater city car based on the Segway scooter, a vehicle which has done more to advance situation comedy than personal transportation. The oblivious magician Gob Bluth drove one on Arrested Development, not caring that he was chasing pedestrians off the sidewalk, and Niles Crane briefly tooled around his brother's apartment on Fraser. With the effete Niles there was the added whammy of watching a man who simply can't handle his technology, all very funny until you realize where it leads. Bush showed himself a techno-fool by falling off a Segway in 2003, shortly after he invaded Iraq.

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