A must-read piece in Salon by Michael Lind, a figure who's made a long and thoughtful journey from Right to Left. As he says, the N-word really doesn't deserve all the opprobrium heaped on it since the end of the Bush era:
The early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual... Like today's right, the '70s left favoured theatrical protest over discussion and debate. Boomer nostalgia to the contrary, in the case of practically every domestic issue disputed by the counterculture and the original neoconservatives the mainstream progressive position today is that of the neoconservatives of the '70s. While the neoconservatives of the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s exaggerated Soviet power, the kind of muscular liberal internationalism that Pat Moynihan defended against the left in the 1970s and
The new album by Yasmin Levy, that audacious Ladino-meets-flamenco singer from Israel, has a cover version of the song that everyone wants to cover. How will it go down with the LC fan club?
Dr Crippen - who's now a columnist at the Guardian - warns against more tampering with the role of GPs:
It is about pandering to Sebastian and Hermione – the demanding, middle-class, focus-group attending, foreign-holiday booking ("Why should I have to pay for those malaria tablets?"), Bupa-subscribing "worried-well" who demand the "right" to see a doctor at a time and place of their own choosing for any condition, however trivial. Sebastian wants to discuss his athlete's foot. Hermione wants to know if bio-yoghurt with bifidus digestivus will help her intestinal yeast problem. Today. Now. In their lunch hour, please. With any doctor who is free.
The demand is insatiable, and the only way the government can cater for it is by dumbing-down the service and moving towards a 24/7 "medical supermarket"... Boundary-free, one-size-fits-all, 24/7 supermarket medicine might meet the current needs of Sebastian and Hermione and all their worried-well friends. But when they get older and perhaps develop serious illnesses, they will miss the depth of knowledge and the continuity of care they used to get from their family doctor.
Indian Muslims gather for Eid ud-Fitr prayers at the Jama Masjid in New Delhi. A three-day celebration, Eid marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. [Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images]
Geiger begins with the stories of three people who had near-fatal experiences -- Ron DiFrancesco, one of the last people out of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre before it collapsed on 9/11; James Sevigny, a mountain climber severely injured in an avalanche while climbing in Canada; and Stephanie Schwabe, an underwater explorer who lost her guideline in an underwater cave in the Bahamas. As different as each experience was, all three were visited by a ghostly visitor that calmed them, instilled hope and enabled them to rescue themselves...
Geiger gathers many such stories and reports on various theories offered to explain them. His book is engrossing, balanced (no barbs are directed at sceptics or believers) -- and, in the end, this book may be more challenging to some people's religious
Indian Muslims gather for Eid ud-Fitr prayers at the 
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