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  • Private Screeners Return

    So after all the wrangling and expense, not to mention the Republicans’ largest expansion of the federal government in American history, « airport screening is being returned to the private sector » by the Transportation Sicherheits Dienst: ‘Airports that want to replace government security screeners with privately employed workers can do so by early next summer, the…

  • In Agreement

    Just when I thought I’d never agree with anything Dale Peck said, he goes and says this in an interview with Ellen Heltzel: Why does literature have to be so boring? And why, when it is funny, does it have to be so juvenile? Dave Eggers does the post-modern, “I’m talking about the book that…

  • A Confederacy of Fixtures

    It’s somewhat amusing to see that John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that was on Stanford’s Summer Reading List for incoming freshmen when I was getting ready to enter college, is still a fixture—this year it’s on the UC Berkeley Summer Reading List. (Oddly, Stanford doesn’t seem to have its reading list—if…