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I was just reminiscing about one of my favorite Onion articles ever:

WASHINGTON, DC—Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

In this January 2001 satire, Bush goes on to detail all the ways he will correct Clinton's "mistakes." ("Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.") It turns out there's an annotated version out there, which links each of Bush's fictional promises to... a real-world description of how he actually carried them out.

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I really enjoyed Shattered Glass, the movie about Stephen Glass, who fabricated dozens of articles for The New Republic in the mid-90s. It covers a couple of my favorite topics--journalism and lying--and is itself interestingly journalistic in tone. The DVD commentary track, featuring director Billy Ray and Chuck Lane, Glass's editor, is also great. The movie doesn't claim to be non-fiction--there are composite characters and made-up dialogue--but it tracks real-life events closely enough that the commentators slip back and forth between talking about actors, characters, and the real people on which they're based. At several points Ray asks Lane to talk about "what you were thinking during this conversation," and it's a conversation that really happened, so it's a question that actually makes sense.

arts, travel

The Door in the Floor. Elvis Costello, serial collaborator. Rock band therapy. And Mark Wahlberg's new satirical series about his own entourage.

Susan Allen Toth, my family's onetime landlady, encounters standing stones, gravestones, granite outcrops, and also some living human beings on the Outer Hebrides. Scott Norvell (no real estate connection that I'm aware of) goes fossil-hunting on England's Jurassic Coast. Oh, and What's Doing in Boston, including a science museum exhibit on "Risk".

week in review

Barbara Ehrenreich--who I guess is subbing for Thomas Friedman?--looks at the Bush administration's marriage policies.

It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women's No. 1 problem, which is poverty — unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.'s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning — in the case of poverty-stricken women — blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.

The answer is 2.3.

( American ethnicity, disenfranchised felons, airport security, airport culture, architecture, marriage, Southernness. )

The NEA says people are reading less, especially young people, but Charles McGrath thinks maybe they aren't, or maybe they are, but anyway, it's not such a big deal. Of particular interest to bloggers, perhaps, is his last paragraph:

The really scary news in "Reading at Risk" is tucked away on page 22. While the number of people reading literature has gone down, the number of people trying to write it has actually gone up. We seem to be slowly turning into a nation of "creative writers," more interested in what we have to say ourselves than in reading or thinking about what anyone else has to say.

Okay, go!