July 2007 Archives

Watch for the Leon Fleisher documentary, TWO HANDS, on Cinemax this Thursday evening, August 2 at 7pm. Here and Now story with interview airs Wednesday, 8/1, around 12:45 EDT on WBUR-FM, Boston, 90.9. Check this page for audio after 2pm that afternoon.

from David Runciman in the London Review of Books:

What has gone is the traditional magic of pop radio that came, as Dylan describes it in his memoirs, from the experience of tuning the dial and having to settle for the best you could find. There are no more dials to tune. Instead, on digital radio, you can flick through the names of every station you might possibly want to listen to. Choice is wonderful for extending variety and driving up quality. But the downside of choice is that the listener has to choose. This might not matter so much for people who know exactly what they want; for them the digital revolution is a godsend (the internet can find you a station for any interest under the sun, with the promise to come of stations personalised to individual listeners' tastes). But when it comes to pop music interspersed by relatively mindless chat, choice spoils things. It's impossible not to be impressed by the skill Chris Moyles devotes to being reliably zany and boisterous 60 hours a month, but it's hard to stick with it knowing one could be listening to almost anything else. Moyles is a better DJ than Tony Blackburn ever was. But there was a good reason to listen to Tony Blackburn if you wanted mindless chat in the morning: that's all there was...

TO THE EDITOR:

As a longtime admirer of Linda Greenhouse, I nevertheless object to the widespread yet editorially biased term "centrist" when referring to retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ("In Steps Big and Small, Supreme Court Moved Right," July 1, 2007).

Just look at the two most important decisions of O'Connor's career, defining moments when her judgment affected not just law but all aspects of American life. The first was Bush v. Gore in 2000, when O'Connor voted as part of a 5-4 majority to stop counting votes in Florida -- votes that would have given that state's electoral votes, and the Presidency, to Al Gore. Even staunch Republicans, like Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, now publicly regret the events that flowed from that vote. (By this measure, even Justice Kennedy no longer qualifies as a "swing" or "centrist" vote, since he voted for Bush as well.)

O'Connor's second overwhelmingly conservative decision came when she retired during the summer of 2006. At the time, this was rumored to be a "personal" decision, based on a family illness. And yet O'Connor sat on the Iraq Study group under James Baker III, served as chancellor of the College of William and Mary, and remained living in the Washington DC metropolis. Her decision to retire BEFORE Chief Justice William Rehnquist's death led directly to the right-leaning court we have today, and yet her decision to step down was completely voluntary -- nothing and nobody "forced" her off the court.

How can anyone responsible for such decisions be called a "centrist"?

--TR