Interesting read of the day...

Click here.

New Music (**updated**)

Since my last music post, here are albums both new and new to me...

Wolf Parade - Apologies To The Queen Mary
Interpol - Antics
Gillian Welch - Soul Journey
The Amazing Pilots - Hello My Captor
Rilo Kiley - More Adventurous
Matt Sweeny & Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Superwolf
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Master and Everyone
Dressy Bessy - Little Music
The 6ths - Wasps' Nests
The Magnetic Fields - I
The Magnetic Fields - Holiday
The Magnetic Fields - The Charm of the Highway Strip
Sufjan Stevens - Come On Feel The Illinois!
Stars - Heart
Pedro the Lion - It's Hard to Find a Friend
Bill Evens - Waltz for Debby
The Aislers Set - Terrible Things Happen
The Boy Least Likely To - The Best Party Ever

===updated===

Bloc Party - Two More Years / Hero (Single)
My Morning Jacket - Z
Calexico / Iron & Wine - In The Reins
Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better
Sigur Rós - Takk...

Tune in next month to see what's new in the AYT jukebox.

book review | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

This looks like an interesting (but long) book:

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
by Tony R. Judt.

If you'd like to read a review, click here.

Here's a couple paragraphs from the review:

"Most general histories," he says, "even very good general histories, don't quite know what to do with culture — ideas, novels, film, and art — and either ignore it completely or else pop it in a little section called 'Culture.' I was determined neither to ignore it nor to segregate it."

Along with a dose of cultural history, Mr. Judt also dispenses judgments that will raise eyebrows, especially in the United States. Poststructuralist theory, for instance, takes a few sharp knocks. (In one footnote, Mr. Judt writes of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that "even by the lax standards of Sixties-era Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in medicine, biology, and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or reputation.")

Quizzed about those barbs, Mr. Judt observes that "one of the distorting effects" of theory's influence in American academe is that theory's totemic figures — Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva — are "seen as much more prominently at the center of European thought than they actually are. Whereas I deliberately 'decentered' them, to use a cliché, and put them where I think they belong, which is within the intellectual and cultural world of Europe, but much more at the periphery."

Today's European intellectuals, he adds, have lost their public platform. As an example, he cites the apathy surrounding a 1993 essay project, led by Derrida (who died in 2004) and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, to forge a European response to growing American unilateralism. "The whole project sputtered out," writes Mr. Judt. "One hundred years after the Dreyfus affair, 50 years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe's leading intellectuals had thrown a petition — and no one came."

article | "Women And Girls Last?: Averting the Second Post-Katrina Disaster"

by Elaine Enarson

"Hurricane Katrina is an American story, as yet untold, and as much about women and men as it is about race and class. It was low-income African American women, many of them single mothers, whose pleas for food and water were broadcast around the world; women, more than men, who were evacuated (or not) from nursing homes; and women, more than men, whose precarious "escape" was made with infants, children and elders in tow. Conversely, we know from other disasters that women will also be at the heart of the city's rebirth and the emotional center of gravity for others on the long road to the "new normal". It is often said that men rebuild structures while women reweave the social fabric of life - and women along this hard-hit coast will surely stitch the quilts, tell the stories, organize the memorials, and sing the songs of Katrina.

In the dreary months ahead, women's domestic burdens will be exceptional ... and exceptionally invisible. The challenges of "homemaking" are vastly more difficult in a FEMA trailer, a friend's apartment or the basement of a church..."

Read the whole article...