I e-mailed my encouragement to Lance Harke, the Miami attorney going after America Online on behalf of customers swamped by long distance phone bills after a free trial offer. I asked him if he used AOL. He wrote: "I do not use AOL but can understand why some do." And lest you think lawyers are a slithery breed, he signed it, "Have a wonderful holiday season."

Who will write suburban history, and how? I was walking, lost, through a far West Chicago suburb last night. The place, the aura of it, the quietness of it, not only lacks the city's noise and density, but its sense of place, its sense of past. Walk down State Street, Halsted, Washington in downtown Chicago, and history swipes you over the head. All the settlers and wokers, politicians and professionals and poor who have shared those streets over the years. And the history is well-documented, or at least within reach of a researcher. But how to write about a place that exists for its lack of past, its newness, its remoteness from everything, which looks exactly like any other suburb across the nation? Covering the city this semester I've learned some of the stories behind buildings, what they used to be and who used to live and work in them. And I've learned why Chicago is distinct from other places. But in the burbs, there is no history, no distinctiveness, no So-and-so Slept Here, no ghosts walking the streets. And with its cookie cutter architecture and temporary feel, none likely will ever walk, no buildings are likely to stand for decades and be re-used more readily than wiped out. I am interested in Unexpected Chicagoland, but beyond that, I wonder how history will change when its subject has no soul.

Haven't made it through the whole thing yet, and not fully sure what to make of it, but this Washington Monthly piece is worth reading:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0111.green.html

One of the wisest religious writers I know is Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary. Here's a provocative column for Beliefnet on being an evangelical Christian and fasting for Ramadan:
http://www.beliefnet.org/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/93/story_9306_1.html...

An original take on Harry Potter from a Catholic discussion forum: It's not the witches; it's the secularism.
http://www.beliefnet.org/frameset.asp?pageLoc=/story/17/story_1739_1.html&boardID=2124

Numbers: 757: Millions of dollars given to charitable relief organizations in the three weeks after September 11, although it's a little hasty to see this as an uprooting of America's deeply planted consumption values, as the Boston Globe says. Again, see Anna Quindlen.

Print and memorize Anna Quindlen's latest column in Newsweek. What a weird country with weird values:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/662666.asp?0dm=-138K

Peggy Noonan has a book out about character with Ronald Reagan, habitual truth-twister and anything but a family man, incongruously on the front. I don't expect her to report that Jimmy Carter was the most sincere Christian and best human being to occupy the White House in the last 100 years, which he was, even if he was a poor politician. Book Magazine is better:
http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue19/carter.shtml

Provoked is not the same as justified. The right casts anyone who asks tough questions of our country as blame-America and un-patriotic, but there should be room for sound discussion like this from E.J. Dionne:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3811-2001Nov22.html

Conspiracy theories surround the Jordan comeback in the Washington City Paper:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/cheap/cheap.html

Especially lucid column from the typically sensible Molly Ivins about Aghanistan. Why is it so hard for everyone else to make so much sense? Excerpts:

"In the first place, there's not much there to hit, and in the second place, we are up against the dismal fact that the bombing campaign could well cause the starvation of literally millions of Afghans who never did anything to us."

"The Northern Alliance is not the good guys; they're just a different set of bad guys."

No, bloodlusting right, that's not communist or pacifist, that's just common sense.

http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/national/ivins/story/1135792p-1203440c.html

And speaking of Harry Potter, isn't Santa Claus and the commercial notion of "Christmas magic" a far more offensive affront to Christ?