Link Roundup: Fresh Ayers, Fred Pearce, and what to do with an old Wal-Mart

Bill Ayers was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air earlier this week (the interview was praised by James Fallows of the Atlantic here). Also check out his interview with Walter Shapiro at Salon, which has an accompanying video. A talk Ayers gave in Washington was covered by the Washington Post and NPR.

Fred Pearce appeared on Living on Earth to discuss Confessions of an Eco-Sinner. Citizen Reader suggests using the principles in the book to guide your holiday shopping.

Amy Alexander discusses the incoming president.

Don't know what to do with the abandoned big-box store in your town? Here are a few ideas. (Thanks, Susan Campbell.)

Nancy Polikoff discusses Thomas and Nancy Beatie's legal status as parents.

Recent Posts on Beacon Broadside:

Home for the Holidays? by Jacqueline Olds, MD, and Richard Schwartz, MD

Obamanomics for the Missing Class by Victor Tan Chen

Equality Deferred by Lillian Rubin

Do You Know Your Genes? By Clare Dunsford

Home for the Holidays?

Today's post is from Jacqueline Olds, MD, and Richard S. Schwartz, MD, authors of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. Drs. Olds and Schwartz are both psychoanalysts and Associate Clinical Professors of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Olds teaches child psychiatry and Dr. Schwartz teaches adult psychiatry at the McLean and Massachusetts General Hospitals. Married to each other and with two grown children, they each maintain a private practice in Cambridge, MA. They have written two other books, Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life and Marriage in Motion.

On the front page of the Boston Globe, just beneath the story on surging unemployment, is another headline. "Guess who's not coming to dinner? Amid slump, holiday travel plans stall." The economic crisis threatens to disrupt one of the few moments when we, as Americans, regularly remember that electronic connections can't replace a family meal. Thanksgiving has been the time to emerge from our wired (and wireless) solitude to move real bodies through physical space, over clogged highways and through packed airports to be at the table with our families for the holiday. But even before the economic crisis, it was already tempting not to go.

These days, we can do so much from home – our work, our shopping, our socializing, our game-playing. It's not only convenient; it's also high status. It shows that we have access to all the latest technologies of connection. It shows we are freer than neighbors who are still tied to commutes and schedules. Busyness itself has become high status, an upwardly mobile contest to see who can keep more balls in the air. With so much to do, who has time to run to the store? Or to pack up for the holidays?

Obamanomics for the Missing Class

Today's post is from Victor Tan Chen, co-author (with Katherine S. Newman) of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and the founding editor and president of INTHEFRAY Magazine. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Newsday and the Minority Law Journal, and in the book Chutes and Ladders. He is a Harvard doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy.

Now that Barack Obama has won the presidency, and the Democrats have broadened their majorities in Congress, the picture looks a little less bleak for the country's poor and near poor families.

In policies ranging from taxes to health care, from housing to job creation, Obamanomics will likely provide some welcome relief from the status quo of the last eight years, during which the ranks of low-income households grew. In 2000, 29.2 percent of the population, or 81 million Americans, lived on household incomes of less than twice the poverty line. In 2007, 30.5 percent of the country, or 91 million Americans, fell into this bottom category of poor and near poor households.

In our book The Missing Class, Katherine Newman and I looked at the situation of near poor families at the end of last decade and the beginning of this decade. Rates of poverty and near poverty were steadily falling from their peaks in the early 1990s. Americas economy was roaring. But as we described in our book, even in those boom years near poor families were struggling mightily to find quality health care, housing, and education for their children.

Now that another downturn is upon us, the economic fortunes of the less well-off look far worse. And having just approved a massive infusion of government money to prop up the country's floundering banks, the federal government — even with a progressive president at the helm — will find its options even more limited than is usually the case during recession times, as half-a-trillion-dollar budget deficits feed interest rate rises and worsen the market malaise.

Equality Deferred

Today's post is from Lillian B. Rubin, the author of twelve books, including 60 on Up, The Man with the Beautiful Voice, Tangled Lives, Worlds of Pain, Intimate Strangers, and Just Friends. A sociologist and psychotherapist, Dr. Rubin is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley.

On May 16, 2008 the California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage. The ink hadn't yet dried on the landmark decision when opponents filed an initiative, Proposition 8, to appear on the November 2008 ballot that would amend the state's constitution to read: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

But it didn't dim the celebration because no one seriously thought it would pass. Not here in California; not now in 2008; not our neighbors, our friends, our allies in a hundred political struggles over the years.

Everyone knew, of course, that there were deeply-held feelings in opposition to same-sex marriage, that forty-seven states prohibit it, that most don't recognize the legitimacy of such marriages that are performed in states that allow it, and that at least one, Wisconsin, whose constitution was amended in 2006 to prohibit same-sex marriage, has a longstanding, little-known law that carries up to a $10,000 fine, nine months in prison, or both for couples who return to the state after marrying legally elsewhere. The law, passed decades ago to prevent teenagers from crossing state lines to marry, could now be used against same-sex couples, the Madison Capitol Times warned recently.

But that was there. This was here and now: a new time, a new day, a new beginning. Indeed, optimism was so high that UCLA's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy projected that about half of California's roughly 100,000 same-sex couples would marry in the next three years and 68,000 out-of-state couples would travel to California to exchange vows.

Fast forward to November 4, 2008 – Election Day. By a five-point margin, roughly 52-47, California voters said yes to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Yes, here in California; yes, now in 2008; yes, our neighbors, our friends, our allies in a hundred political struggles over the years.

Do You Know Your Genes?

Today's post is from Clare Dunsford, author of Spelling Love with an X: A Mother, A Son, and the Gene that Binds Them. Dunsford is an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College and has been a contributing writer for Boston College Magazine. She was previously an adjunct lecturer in English at Boston College and Harvard University.

Maybe you have heard of the HGP, the Human Genome Project. But have you heard about the PGP-10? This daring group of ten genetic pioneers has agreed to post their personal genomes on the Web in an effort to create a database of information that may lead to faster cures for genetic diseases. Very few of us have anything but the vaguest and most anecdotal information about the genes we carry: "I've got Aunt Hilda's hips and Uncle Frank's short temper." Certainly my family and I were not aware of our own genetic inheritance before my son's diagnosis with fragile X syndrome in 1993; the FMR1 gene wasn't even discovered until two years before. Fragile X is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common known cause of autism.

When I sat in front of a genetic counselor a couple of years after the initial diagnosis, I saw my family arrayed before me like a poorly designed Tinkertoy—a bunch of squares and circles connected by lines. The genetic counselor informed me that every person carries six to eight genes that are problematic. I just happened to know the name of one of mine. FMR1 this little creature is called. When a section of nucleotides called CGG repeats too many times, a vital protein is not produced, leading to cognitive disability, emotional difficulties and attention deficit.

In the fifteen years since my family learned of fragile X, the full human genome has been sequenced, much more quickly than anyone predicted, and genetic tests have been developed for over 1500 conditions. Some day (if you don't already) you will know the name of one of your own genes, one of the half dozen that carry the potential to make you ill or change your personality or cause you to bear a child who will never be independent.

Link Roundup: Bill Ayers TV appearances, Nan Mooney on student loans and toys, Kai Wright on Prop 8

Bill Ayers appeared on Good Morning America and Democracy Now! this morning. The latter interview, which is longer and more substantive, includes his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

Bill McKibben discusses Obama's Big Climate Challenge.

Nan Mooney (Not Keeping Up With Our Parents) talks about College Loan Slavery. She was also on Babble this week worrying about whether her son is toy-deprived.

In the economic downturn, social services programs are losing funding. In Hartford, a program to help kids in the aftermath of sexual assault; in New York, the Ali Forney Center, the only full-time drop-in center for homeless gay youth in the city.

Kai Wright (Drifting Toward Love) looks into the "Prop 8 Blame Game."

Jeremy Adam Smith at Daddy Dialectic talks about how the economy affects stay-at-home parenthood.

Recent Posts on Beacon Broadside:

A Graphic Book Adaptation of Geoffrey Canada's Fist Stick Knife Gun

Bill Ayers to appear on Good Morning America

Raped in the Military? You May Have to Pay for Your Own Forensic Exam Kit

On Gay Marriage and Family Issues, A Change is Gonna Come

Veterans' Day: A Soldier—His Prayer

Barack Obama's Religious Views and Howard Thurman

A Graphic Book Adaptation of Geoffrey Canada’s Fist Stick Knife Gun

Today's post is from Jamar Nicholas, a Philadelphia-based cartoonist, illustrator and educator. He is currently working on a graphic adaptation of Geoffrey Canada's bestselling memoir, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, a book in which "Canada describes the rituals and codes of violence that governed life for children like him, growing up in the inner city in the 50's and 60's." Nicholas has created several popular comics, most notably web-comic Detective Boogaloo: Hip Hop Cop, and he teaches at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I was born in Philadelphia, PA, in the early 1970s. It's hard to find a picture of me as a youth where I'm smiling.

That's not entirely true. I did smile when necessary - I worked up what we called a "Kool-Aid" smile whenever I had been ordered to do so for the camera. I didn't really smile under my own recognizance. The reason being was that I hated childhood.

You'd think that what should follow is some hard-scrabble story of an anguished upbringing in a troubled home, but it didn't exactly go down like that. Most of my painful memories came from leaving the house every day to go out into the world—to school or, maybe, down the block to the corner store/bodega/mom & pop to get the Sunday paper, walking home, on the bus—just being outside was the worst thing in the world when I was a kid.

Wait, though—kids LOVE going outside, right? Yes, but… that's where the other kids are. The ones from "around the corner" who you hoped weren't there to harass you when you walked home. The kids on your block who demanded you prove yourself. You couldn't be a "punk" or "soft" in front of these kids. These were the kids you had to fight for your bicycle every month, or fight to keep that brand new Philadelphia '76ers jacket you got for your birthday. I hated the fact that every time I left the house, the real threat of violence in some manner was always just a crooked glance away at all times.

Bill Ayers to appear on Good Morning America

Bill Ayers will discuss the reissue of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist with Chris Cuomo on tomorrow's Good Morning America. (UPDATE: link to story)

Beacon Press had planned to publish a new edition of Fugitive Days with a new afterword in April 2009 after reverting the paperback rights from Penguin books in April of 2008.  Because of the intense interest in Bill Ayers generated by the McCain/Palin campaign, Beacon decided to move up publication to November.  However, since Mr. Ayers did not want to inject himself or his own story any further into the election debate, we agreed to hold release of the new edition and media interviews about the book until after the elections.

Ayers posted here last January about the final Bush State of the Union address. We posted a note from Beacon Press about Bill last summer when his name was first brought up in the Democratic Presidential debates. And we've extensively linked to press coverage of Ayers in recent months. Here's a few of the most recent links:

Bill Ayers Speaks: Washington Post

Mr. Ayers's Neighborhood: New Yorker Blog

Ex-Radical Talks of Education and Justice, Not Obama: New York Times

Raped in the Military? You May Have to Pay for Your Own Forensic Exam Kit

Today's post is from Penny Coleman, author of Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War. Coleman writes frequently on Veterans' issues for Alternet, where this story originally appeared.

Sarah Palin's decision not to pay for rape kits when she was mayor of Wasilla was an issue in the campaign for the White House. But allow me to introduce the large pink elephant that has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room:

At the Winter Soldier Investigation* in March, Spec. Patricia McCann, who served in Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard from 2003-4, read a memo issued to all MEDCOM commanders clarifying that "SAD kits"-- which are forensic rape kits--"are not included in TRICARE coverage."

TRICARE, the United States Department of Defense Military Health System that covers active duty members, will only pay for rape kits if the victim is seen in a military or a VA facility.

But the Pentagon acknowledges that 80 percent of military rapes are never reported. And that 80 percent who go off-base to protect their anonymity (and/or their careers) are on their own. If a soldier is on leave, or is five-hours from the nearest VA, or if a soldier is simply delivered to the nearest hospital by the local ambulance driver, their rape kits are not covered under TRICARE. Neither are other forensic exams that might be used in domestic violence situations.

Front-line treatment shouldn't be conditional on where a rape occurs or where the nearest treatment is available. This is not only a parity issue, but a further obstacle to treatment and justice.

On Gay Marriage and Family Issues, A Change is Gonna Come

Today's post is from Karen Kahn and Patricia A. Gozemba, co-authors, with Marilyn Humphries, of Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages. The former editor of Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Karen Kahn also edited Frontline Feminism: Essays from Sojourner's First Twenty Years. A former professor of English and Women's Studies, Patricia A. Gozemba is the coauthor of Pockets of Hope: How Students and Teachers Change the World. Kahn and Gozemba were married in September 2005. Watch their new video at www.youtube.com/courtingequality.

Last week, America voted for hope, not fear. For peace, not war. For love, not hatred. The election of Barack Obama represents what is best in the American spirit---fairness, equality, respect for hardworking people, a belief in a better tomorrow. It has been a long time coming. As Obama has said again and again over the last 21 months, America is a nation defined by its continued desire to form "a more perfect union."

Unfortunately, for the LGBT community, voters who went to the polls in record numbers on Tuesday, voted their fears on the issues that matter to us most—respect for our families. We lost votes on marriage equality in three states: California, Florida and Arizona. And in Arkansas, voters banned unmarried couples from serving as foster or adoptive parents. This measure, clearly aimed at gay families, is perhaps the most damaging of this year's initiatives in that it so blatantly carries the message that gay people are harmful to children.

If history provides any lessons, Arkansas and the nation can be heartened by the Massachusetts story. In 1986, when a similar policy was introduced in Massachusetts, it galvanized the LGBT community. In our book Courting Equality, we tell the story of how the Massachusetts foster care controversy set our community on the path toward full equality—culminating in Massachusetts becoming the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. Arkansas homophobes beware!

Veterans’ Day: A Soldier—His Prayer

This anonymous poem was blown into a slit trench in Tunisia during a heavy bombardment in the early days of World War II. It was included in Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, edited by Joan Murray.

A Soldier—His Prayer

Stay with me, God. The night is dark,
The night is cold: my little spark
Of courage dies. The night is long;
Be with me God, and make me strong.

I love a game; I love a fight.
I hate the dark; I love the light.
I love my child; I love my wife.
I am no coward. I love Life,

Life with its change of mood and shade.
I want to live. I'm not afraid,
But me and mine are hard to part;
Oh, unknown God, lift up my heart.

You stilled the waters at Dunkirk
And saved Your servants. All Your work
Is wonderful, dear God. You strode
Before us down that dreadful road.

We were alone, and hope had fled;
We loved our country and our dead.
And could not shame them; so we stayed
The course and were not much afraid.

Dear God that nightmare road! And then
That sea! We got there—we were men.
My eyes were blind, my feet were torn,
My soul sang like a bird at dawn.

I knew that death is but a door.
I knew what we were fighting for:
Peace for the kids, our brothers freed,
A kinder world, a cleaner breed.

I'm but the son my mother bore,
A simple man, and nothing more.
But—God of strength and gentleness,
Be pleased to make me nothing less.

Help me, O God, when Death is near
to mock the haggard face of fear,
That when I fall—if fall I must—
My soul may triumph in the Dust.

Barack Obama’s Religious Views and Howard Thurman

Today's post is from Peter Eisenstadt, who is currently at work, with co-author Quinton Dixie, on The Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man: Howard Thurman in India and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Eisenstadt was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of New York State and editor of Black Conservatism: Essays in Intellectual and Political History.

The religious and spiritual roots of Barack Obama's worldview have been discussed and debated since he emerged on the political scene. Now that he has been elected to the presidency, these questions have only gained in their importance. Unfortunately, much of the discussion about Obama and the Black Church has concerned the controversy over his one-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. If the Wright controversy has no other positive results, it fostered discussion of Obama's religious heritage. One of the most lucid of these contributions was an article by Darryl Pinckney last summer in the New York Review of Books, "Obama and the Black Church," in the course of which he allots several paragraphs to Howard Thurman, surely one of the most distinguished 20^th century American religious thinkers, black or white.

Although Pinckney does not mention it in his article, Obama has acknowledged a debt to Thurman. Howard Thurman I think represents some of the best in America. In an interview with filmmaker Arleigh Prelow, Obama said "I constantly refer back to the work that's been done by Dr. King, Dr. Thurman, and others whose shoulders really I stand on." (The film is not finished, but excerpts from the documentary in progress can be viewed at the Freedom Theater at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver, Ayers interviews, Race and the Election

"The Poet Goes to Indiana" by Mary Oliver was featured on the Writer's Almanac recently.

Bill Ayers was interviewed by the Washington Post for this piece that ran that day after the election—the New Yorker's David Remnick was there, too. Last week, Garry Trudeau offered this commentary on the pre-election media.

On Slate, one more eloquent defense of scholar Rashid Khalidi made it in before the election.

Colm Tóibín wrote this piece for the New York Review of Books about similarities between Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son.

Kevin Scott appeared on New Hampshire Public Radio to discuss The Porning of America.

Amy Alexander and Dr. Alvin Pouissaint co-wrote a pre-election article for The Root about managing the stress of history and led this post-election discussion about African-American reactions at Washington Post.

Latoya Peterson analyzed the ways we talked about race and identity during the campaign.

Jay Wexler submits a Supreme Court Humor Special Report on the "F-Word and S-Word Case" (except that he uses bad words). Frederick Lane discussed the lower court ruling here.

Recent Posts on Beacon Broadside

Memories of Studs Terkel from One of Thousands of Good Friends

Before the Victory Celebration: Religious Scholars in Chicago

Thoughts on Race, Identity and the Obamas

Greenspan Passes the Buck

Memories of Studs Terkel from One of Thousands of Good Friends

Studs Terkel passed away last week at the age of 96. Rick Ayers, the author of Studs Terkel's Working: A Teaching Guide (New Press, 2002) and Great Books for High School Kids (Beacon Press), shares here some of his memories of the great oral historian.

When my friends and I met Studs Terkel, in 1963, we were a bunch of high school suburban rebels, living twenty miles west of Chicago. We sought freedom by turning our dial to the black music stations, WVON and WYNR – discovering the beat of Bo Diddley and the heart of Aretha Franklin. And we also came across WFMT, Chicago's "fine arts" radio station. We would sit up with the funky and eclectic folk and blues show, Midnight Special, on Saturday nights and listen to Studs Terkel interviews in the mornings.

One day we ventured down to the loop to take a record album in to the Midnight Special producer. As we sat in the WFMT studio, Studs came bustling out, all distracted and busy, his hair flying, a sheaf of papers, notes and records under his arm. In all his hurry, though, he stopped and said, "Hello, you young people, what are you doing here?" He immediately gave us all of his focus. Leaning over, then sitting on the edge of a chair, he wanted to find out all about us. Soon he boiled down his search to a central question, one he came back to again and again in our years of acquaintance, "I wonder, though, what made you bunch of suburban kids – you're supposed to be training to be bank managers, you're supposed to be practicing your swing at the country club – what made you come down here to Chicago, what made you dissatisfied with your world? What is making these kids from the suburbs go down south, go on picket lines? What makes you tick?"

With that, we began to think differently about ourselves. We weren't just confused and bored and dissatisfied. We were a phenomenon. We were pioneers. We were interesting. You can't imagine what that means to a teenager.

In many ways, the interviewer, the documenter, tells you back your story with more clarity than you told it. If the interviewer is sloppy, selfish, or narrow, you will resent the story he tells and deny its truth. If he is Studs, you recognize its essential truth and begin to understand yourself, and your life, better.

Before the Victory Celebration: Religious Scholars in Chicago

Today's post is from Amy Caldwell, Executive Editor at Beacon Press.

This year's American Academy of Religion conference took place in Chicago, home of Barack-mania, and while the academy wasn't claiming divine foresight for discerning back in 2000 or so that this would be the place to be in 2008, a few folks thought the unseasonably warm and sunny weather was clearly a sign of divine favor. The scholars of AAR decidedly tend towards the Democratic Party, and a general feeling of guarded optimism and excitement suffused the conference. At the beginning of outgoing president's Emilie Townes' plenary address Saturday night, cries of "Yes We Can" even briefly erupted from the crowd.

Which is not to say that everyone is sanguine about the outcome of the election. In his opening remarks at a session on the effects of the "War on Terror" on American Muslims, Omid Safi, chair of the AAR's study of Islam section and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, described a propaganda DVD that has recently appeared in the mailboxes of voters in swing states. Entitled "Obsession," the message of this DVD is that Muslims are the second coming of the Nazis, that 2008 is equivalent to 1938, and that we must rise up and stop them. The DVD was distributed in copies of the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education delivered in the Midwest. In contrast to this disturbing incitement to violence against innocent Americans, Safi tartly noted that ritually stating, at any public event, "we hate and decry terrorism" has become a virtual sixth pillar of Islam for American Muslims.

Thoughts on Race, Identity and the Obamas

Today's post is from Tram Nguyen, the former editor of ColorLines magazine, author of We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11, and editor of a forthcoming collection, "Language is a Place of Struggle": Great Quotes by People of Color.

The quote that got Michelle Obama into trouble actually made me like her even more, not only for her candor but for articulating something I've started to feel for the first time in my adult life too.

Here's what she actually said: "People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and… for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

For me, as a first-generation, former refugee from Vietnam, it's taken a long time to sort out my cultural, national and political identities, and I resisted calling myself American for most of my life – until recently. If absolutely necessary, it was always a hyphenated version, Asian-American or Vietnamese-American, but even those were never all that convincing to me. The American part was the troubling one, because it didn't seem like I could ever really be part of this country except from the very margins.

Go Vote Today

Intellectual and political leadership should be neither elitist, nor populist; rather it ought to be democratic, in that each of us stands in public space, without humiliation, to put forward our best visions and views for the sake of the public interest. —Cornel West, Scholar

It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy, and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. —Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese leader

We need each other. Each of us is responsible for what happens on this earth. We are each absolutely essential, each totally irreplaceable. Each of us is the swing vote in the bitter election battle now being waged between our best and our worst possibilities. —Leonard Peltier, American Indian activist

These quotes are included in "Language Is a Place of Struggle": Great Quotes by People of Color, edited by Tram Nguyen.

Find your polling location.

Link Roundup: Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Recent Reviews

Scott Horton, in his always excellent blog at Harpers, skewers the "New McCarthyism" in a defense of Rashid Khalidi. More commentary in support of Khalidi, a respected scholar at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, is flooding the web and mainstream media. Check out this piece in the Washington Post and this DailyKos diary responding to it, and this video posted at Talking Points Memo where John Judis concedes that this campaign is even dirtier than the Bush-Dukakis campaign.

Bill Ayers recently spoke on education in New York.

Rev. Forrest Church discussed his memoir Love & Death and his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer on NPR's Fresh Air.

Kate Clinton proposes action for Nov. 5th, whether or not Prop. 8 is defeated in California.

Looking for some good reading? Five librarians got together to compile this list of the Best of the Best of University Presses. Watch their presentation on BookTV. Two Beacon Press books, Once in a Promised Land and Without a Map, made the list.

A quick look at some reviews of recent Beacon Press releases:

PopMatters on The Porning of America

New Orleans Times-Picayune on Confessions of an Eco-Sinner

Cape Cod Times on The Muse of the Revolution

Winston-Salem Journal on Saving Paradise

And recently on Beacon Broadside:

Greenspan Passes the Buck by Marilyn Sewell

Zombie Jamboree in Texas by Glenn Branch

Factory Farms, Dirty Water, and the Bible: Part One and Part Two by Mark Winne

Greenspan Passes the Buck

Today's post is from Marilyn Sewell, senior minister at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon. Sewell is the author of Breaking Free: Women of Spirit at Mid-Life and Beyond and Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhood, and the editor of two collections of poetry, Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry and Cries of the Spirit: More Than 300 Poems in Celebration of Women's Spirituality. This post also appeared on her personal blog, Reflections.

People are mad at Greenspan. Yes, the Lord of the Stock Market, the One True God we worshiped, has failed us, we see. Alan Greenspan, almost three years after retiring as chair of the Federal Reserve, is realizing that free markets don't always self-correct. Last Thursday he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "Those of us who have looked to the self interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief."

Lawmakers asked him to say, "I was wrong, and I'm sorry." Pretty simple. But Greenspan declined. At a time when unprecedented numbers of people all over the nation are losing homes and now losing jobs, as well, the former Chair refused to accept responsibility for the crisis. He did say, however, that his faith in deregulation has been shaken. We were hoping you might have noticed sooner, Mr. Greenspan. And since you have fiercely opposed deregulation for almost 15 years, one would hope that you would at least apologize for letting ideology rather than market realities determine our economic policy. "The whole intellectual edifice . . . collapsed in the summer of last year," he said.

Zombie Jamboree in Texas

Today's post is from Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools. With NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott, he edited Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools.

When the distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher recently addressed the creationist movement in his Living With Darwin, he judiciously assessed creationism in its latest incarnation as historically respectable but currently bankrupt, and proposed to describe it as "dead" science. "In light of its shambling tenacity," I replied, "'zombie science' is perhaps a preferable label." (I was writing in a scholarly journal, so I resisted the temptation to add a reference to "Romero 1968" or "Wright 2004".)

I guess that Halloween came early to Texas, for the zombies are out in force. Three creationists were just appointed to a six-member committee to review a draft set of Texas state biology standards, which determine what is taught in Texas's public school science classrooms and the content of the biology textbooks approved for use in the state. And since Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the country, what happens to textbooks there is relevant to the content of textbooks everywhere.

With all that at stake, why would anyone appoint a creationist, let alone three, to such a committee? Oh, right: the chair of the board, Don McLeroy, is a confessed creationist, who offers folksy criticisms of evolution like, "Given all the time in the world, I don't think I could make a spider out of a rock. However, most of the books we are considering adopting, claim that Nothing made a spider out of a rock." The far-right faction on the state board of education, including McLeroy, presently holds seven of its fifteen seats.