by Kelly Bryan Smith
December 26, 2007
Calling all mothers and mothers-to-be: Jackson’s own queen of the Sweet Potato Queens, Jill Conner Browne, has written a new book, and bless your little hearts, it was written for you. Unless, of course, you are an over-achieving, Junior League “Alpha Mom,” in which case you probably have more pressing concerns, such as making your “own dirt from scratch” for a preschool project.
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by Brandi Herrera Pfrehm
December 19, 2007
Native Americans and European settlers didn’t sit down to a holiday dinner prepared from packaged, processed “McFood” back in the day. Nor did they eat a meal of USDA-certified organic ham. Their thoughts were not yet tied down by the realization of industry’s waste, just as there were no grocery stores and no food marketers to fill their shelves. In our pre-industrial past, our stomachs were guided by a long-evolved code of rituals and manners, which some believe are now buried deep in the genetic map of human omnivores.
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by Jere Nash
December 12, 2007
Thirty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer died in her hometown of Ruleville, Miss., at the age of 60. To mark the anniversary, the University Press of Kentucky has reissued “This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer” (University Press of Kentucky, $24.95), a 1993 biography of Hamer by Kay Mills.
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by Gary Sheppard
December 5, 2007
As a native Mississippian, I was a little hesitant to read a book about Hurricane Katrina. The closest I have been able to get is buying a copy of Douglas Brinkley’s “The Great Deluge” and giving it to my mother after reading the first five pages. Cynicism enveloped me every time I tried to take on a book about the hurricane.
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by James L. Dickerson
November 21, 2007
When the federal government created the CIA in 1947, it was for one purpose only: to gather and analyze information for the president so that America would never again be surprised by a Pearl Harbor-style attack. In that respect, it has failed miserably, the most notable failure being the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
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by James L. Dickerson
November 14, 2007
I was in the control room of a Nashville recording studio with Waylon Jennings, legendary record producer Chips Moman and Johnny Cash’s second wife, June Carter, waiting for ex-Sun Records producer Jack “Cowboy” Clement to arrive with what turned out to be an arm load of Krystal burgers and lemon icebox pies.
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by Megan Morrison
November 7, 2007
Ahdaf Soueif’s “I Think of You” (Anchor Books, 2007, $13) is a loosely intertwined collection of stories where complex characters play center stage against a background of Egyptian Muslim traditions. Structured as vivid snapshots, Soueif’s stories are small, dense blocks of character and situation that barely shed light on action or plot. Her style, however, is unapologetic. Nothing pretends to be something it is not.
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by Matt Smith
October 17, 2007
Want to ruin a perfectly good tailgate party? Invite Dave Zirin. In a place like Mississippi, where sports fandom still has a blinding purity, you can count on Zirin asking the last questions anyone wants to hear. Questions like: “Why was the sordid story of the death of Pat Tillman (NFL safety turned Iraq hero) smothered by propaganda from the Pentagon, the White House and the ‘athletic-industrial complex’?” “Why did 25,000 New Orleanians have to wait for a disaster to afford a seat in the Superdome, a building judged in the 1970s to be the most prudent use of their own tax dollars?” “Why are inner-city American ballfields rotting in filth and disrepair, while major league teams run giant offshore ‘academies’ that feast on cheap, starry-eyed Caribbean teenagers?”
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This is an opinion piece by Adam Cohen, but an interesting overview of the Diaz and Minor prosecutions that we heard so much about around the same time that Barbour was running for governor. It's fascinating -- and no longer surprising -- to see how concerted the political effort from within the Justice Department (and the White House) has been to affect politics in Mississippi and elsewhere.
Any chance we could one day stand up and demand that lawmakers change some of this?
Mississippi’s loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest. It also creates an ideal climate for partisan selective prosecution. Since everyone is making contributions and nurturing friendships that look questionable, a prosecutor can haul any lawyer and judge he doesn’t like before a grand jury and charge corruption. The Justice Department indicted Justice Diaz and Mr. Minor on an array of unconvincing bribery and fraud charges. Justice Diaz was acquitted of all of them. The federal prosecutors then brought tax evasion charges against him. Justice Diaz was acquitted again and still sits on the Mississippi Supreme Court.
by James L. Dickerson
October 10, 2007
There are people living among us who believe that dogs have more intelligence, courage and soul than the average human.
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