http://www.themillions.com Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:14:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 1. In the most recent issue of The Atlantic James Fallows asks a question that’s on a lot of people’s minds these days: “Is America going to hell?”  It’s a provocation that has recurred throughout American history, from John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech ... http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/ample-reason-america-is-ruined-one-good-reason-its-not.html When I was in pharmacy school, the most coveted reference books were the ones which placed a wealth of information at your fingertips. The Drug Information Handbook offered what you’d need to know about any available drug, from pharmacological use to dosage to adverse reactions. The Merck Manual, too, listed ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/on-medicine.html August 6th marked the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and today marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. As part of its op-ed page this weekend, the Los Angeles Times offered several firsthand accounts of the bombings by survivors, taken from a documentary made by the ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-remembered_10.html Millions readers who follow European soccer, the progress of democratic socialism, or international tax policies may be interested in Jonathan Last's article in the Weekly Standard this week about how Gordon Brown's recent tax hike - from 40% to 50% on the top tax bracket - is decimating the English ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/08/socialism-vs-beautiful-game_07.html In the LRB this month, professor and novelist Clancy Martin offers a brutally candid account of his own attempts to get sober. The piece is affecting, horrifying, and enlightening:As a child I visited my older sister in a psychiatric hospital, but I hadn't been inside one for 30 years. Then, ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/07/at-london-review-of-books-clancy-martin_27.html Its laudatory impulses notwithstanding, Louis Menand's worthwhile essay in the current New Yorker on Mark McGurl's The Program Era - an account of the rise of the creative writing program - doesn't quite save the book from sounding depressing. For those with ambitions to write fiction, Menand offers a whirlwind ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/06/from-newsstand-workshop-porn_03.html One of the familiar knocks on the short story master Donald Barthelme is that his fiction is all artifice - that, to quote Saul Bellow, it "lack[s] an inner life." Well, Lorrie Moore, having digested the new Barthelme biography, Hiding Man, is having none of it. "In a way," ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/03/from-newsstand-lorrie-moore-on_11.html Michael Lewis turns in yet another tremendous piece in the current issue of Vanity Fair. This one is about the catastrophic financial collapse in Iceland:Walking into the P.M.'s minute headquarters, I expect to be stopped and searched, or at least asked for photo identification. Instead I find a single ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/03/from-newsstand-michael-lewis-goes-to_04.html A new issue of the excellent online literary review, The Quarterly Conversation has been posted. There are plenty of goodies on offer, but perhaps the most intriguing is a piece by François Monti about Zone, a French novel by Mathias Énard that has certain literary corners of Europe buzzing. ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/03/new-quarterly-conversation_02.html Last week, The New Yorker ran a profile (subscription required) of Ian McEwan that was scarcely shorter than McEwan's most recent novel, On Chesil Beach. For all its expansiveness, however, the article failed to offer readers the supreme pleasure of McEwan's best fiction: a kind of psychological X-ray. And where ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/02/from-newsstand-ian-mcewan-week_24.html