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Lost Mountain paperback

Erik Reece’s Lost Mountain, a look at the devastating effects of radical strip-mining in Appalachia, is out in paperback. On Air America, he discusses U.S. energy policy and more.

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Conjugating spit

I think I’ve always used “spat” as the past tense of “spit,” but evidently some Americans don’t — or didn’t.

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New arts site

I’m occasionally cross-posting to New Critics, a site collecting writing on the arts from fifteen bloggers, many (but not all) of whom write elsewhere about politics.

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Even Nobel Laureates get the blues

At fifteen, I was obsessed with East of Eden. Like Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms, the book was a gift from my mom. I’m convinced she passed it along in part so we could pass time stuck in traffic by identifying similarities between my father and Steinbeck’s feral sociopath, Cathy Ames. Steinbeck is so out . . .

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