The Reason Al Gore Should Concede Time

Bach as Bach Never Intended. Or Did He? The last “Bach year”, the 300th anniversary of his birth, found us in the midst of austere early music realism. Now, at the 250th anniversary of his death, seemingly irreverent transcription is in sway. And the Wu Tang Clan’s reinterpretation of hip hop tradition continues to evolve as well. New York Times

Publishing Declares Open Season on Famous Figures. Joe
DiMaggio; Susan Sontag; Saul Bellow;
Richard M. Nixon; Diana, Princess of
Wales; and Barbara Marx Sinatra,
Frank Sinatra’s widow are among the recent public figures with bullseyes painted on their rumps. New York Times

Burning the Village in Order to Save It. The real crisis for the American electoral process is not the closeness of the election, not the delay in ascertaining the legitimate winner, not the court wrangling over recount deadlines or methods, but the Republican poisoning of the well.

In the last few days the Bush partisans have resorted to an extreme tactic:
forcefully asserting that the Gore camp is trying to “steal” the election. The
charge was replayed all over the media this weekend, and especially on the
more sensational and hyperventalating cable news networks that must stoke
the fires continuously (if only because they burn twenty-four hours a day).
This amounts to the Bush camp jumping ahead of the process and sowing
land mines, and thus ensures that whatever the outcome, voters around the
nation will never be able to have confidence in the process that yielded the
final result.

No matter who prevails in the closest presidential election in American
history, this last tactic may be the one we all remember. It elicits a memory
from the Vietnam era: “We had to burn the village in order to save it.” Tompaine.com

Joe Conason echoes the sentiments: Poisonous Rhetoric Shows Bush is Dividing the Nation. The New York Observer

Annals of the Decline and Fall (cont’d.): Italian research shows married men who have an affair make more attentive husbands
and fathers because their guilt drives them to devote more time to
their homes. Only in a world where cowardice, guilt and deception motivate the finer things in life… The Times of London

Happy Thanksgiving! Why Your Brain(s) Love Thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving may well be the year’s biggest bonanza for your brain — all of them. This
famous feast doesn’t just satisfy the survival instinct of your rudimentary reptilian
brainstem. The gathering of family and friends also serves up the emotional interaction
craved by your mammalian limbic brain. Brain.com

The Last Undecided Senate Race is finally certified, in an event that may prove more important to the political arc of the next few years than the outcome of the contested Presidential vote. Upstart Democrat Maria Cantwell is declared the victor over three-term Republican incumbent Slade Gorton in Washington state, and the Senate is 50-50. (However, if the Democrats win the White House and Joe Lieberman resigns his Connecticut seat, the Republican governor will appoint a Republican in his place.) New York Times