Hey – and I admit this with dubious pride – I graduated from Wilkinsburg High School, the same Wilkinsburg in the article Mary referenced! I recognize NO names from that story, I might add. I escaped Wilkinsburg in 1979.

Studebaker built wagons, fine carriages and other horse-drawn vehicles, and then built cars, trucks and military vehicles. Their pre-WWII cars were highly regarded, and they were first to introduce come out with a totally new design after the war, when Ford, GM and Chrysler were still offering warmed-over pre-war models. They were a significant player in the auto industry into the 1950s.

As a foreign observer of American culture, she points out that any consumer of news would have to assume from what is presented that Baby Suri is as important as the Iraq occupation. Does she look like Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes? Should the U.S. continue its occupation or cut its losses? These questions appear to have equal gravitas when presented by Katie Couric, whose PhotoShopped waistline is also a matter of enormous significance right up there with wars and hurricanes and jet plane crashes and evidently much more important than the genocide in Darfur, which rates no mention at all.

The thing Nafizi says about literature is that it’s truly subversive. It’s the one medium that can make people have empathy for those of a different gender or race or ethnicity or time or place — unlike the news, which dumbs everything down to one-dimensionality.

“The Muslim world,” a Bushism with a fair amount of traction, is one of those dumb-downs, she says. It takes half the world and makes an enemy out of it, never mind that just like the “Christian world” most of its people are high-minded and humane while only some misuse the religion for political ends.

The time is ripe for some literary journalism. I predict that the ‘bloggers who can take things in this direction will be the successors to the dying network and newspaper businesses. People are starved for genuinely good reading and the newspapers aren’t about to provide it. Kevin, even as a columnist, might as well be your garden-variety right-of-center ‘blogger who watches Bill O’Reilly too much, an unoriginal didact who thinks every problem in the world can be traced to an elitist liberal conspiracy emanating from the Ivy League universities he wasn’t smart or rich enough to attend. Today, amazingly, was just one of the few instances in recent memory where he wasn’t on that bent.