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Two unrelated links:

Postcards from LA, a photoblog about, you know, LA.

Dave Eggers in the New York Times on why we need AmeriCorps.

It was the president's words that encouraged young people to send in AmeriCorps applications. Thousands of outrageously qualified applicants were prepared to quit high-paying jobs, to put off graduate school, to move to, say, rural Louisiana - all in the name of national service, in the name of doing something selfless for a country that needed healing. AmeriCorps approved new volunteer slots and assumed it had the support of Congress and the president. Now, on the eve of a new school year, Congress and the White House have turned their backs on these volunteers.

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I got back from lunch to find a notification that Powell's had finally come upon a copy of Taash and the Jesters, a fantasy book I remember loving as a kid, in the Media Center at my elementary school. So I went to the web site to order it, but someone else already had. Never go to lunch.

The good news is, my library has two copies! Also, here's the author's home page.

something there is that doesn't love a wall

Fountains of Wayne on the cover of the Sunday Styles section. Apparently, like Kris Delmhorst, Chris Lightcap, Stephen Sondheim, and me, they went to Williams.

The Sandhills and western Nebraska. Carhenge, the Dismal River, and hours and hours of prairie grass.

Gary Giddins on "The Bob Hope We Should Remember".

A reminder that Frost situated the adage "Good fences make good neighbors" in a context that called it into question. Here's the full text of "Mending Wall", which the Times doesn't provide.

African-American skepticism about U.S. intervention in Liberia and elsewhere.

A sick-making article on new trends in nuclear weapons. "Relatively small" ones range "from a fraction the size of the Hiroshima bomb to several times as large".

Why it's hard to tell an energy program from a weapons program. You know, in Iran.

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The Times had an article a couple of days ago about the Federal Writers' Project, part of Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Just as the rest of the WPA used federal money to create jobs for other laborers, the Writers' Project created work for writers--among them Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their best-known project was the American Guide series, a volume for each of the 48 states. I have, and love, Massachusetts and New York.

"The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it," Steinbeck writes in [Travels with Charley]. "It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating."