The June Harper’s arrived yesterday and is, well, fierce. I’m very glad that I subscribed a few months ago, though I feel a bit flayed by Garret Keizer’s “Climate, Class and Claptrap”:

If I sound bitter it is partly because I have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new carbon-trading world order in the New England villages where I have lived, taught, and buried the dead for close to thirty years, and where any egress from one’s house now risks collision with an eco-fluent carpetbagger. Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial “wind farm,” ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance… (pg 10)

There’s also an absolutely essential article by Sallie Tisdale: “Chemo World: Surviving the cancer unit” that tells me more than I would have thought myself comfortable with knowing about chemotherapy and cytotoxic drugs. It’s right up there with Atul Gawande’s “The Way We Age Now” from last week’s New Yorker as a must-read, especially for those of us who notice that we and others around us are somehow older than we used to be…