Buchanan's brother threatens Clinton associate
BY JAKE TAPPER
(05/20/99)
and
"Hardball" strikes out
BY JOE CONASON
(05/18/99)

The truly scary thing about the false exposé of Cody Shearer by accusers Matthews, Drudge and Limbaugh is not merely that Shearer turned out to be innocent, but that he was able to prove his innocence. What if he had not been out of town? What if he had been home alone watching television at the time of Willey's alleged attack? Would any of the tabloid "reporters," or the public at large, ever have believed in Shearer's innocence?

-- Paul B. Brown
Memphis, Tenn.

What I find interesting is that a man who had "mental disorders" for years was able to get a gun. Or if it was a gun that had been in his house for years, why his family didn't remove it, since Bay Buchanan and other conservatives all say that family, church and friends -- not laws -- should solve the gun problems. It is also interesting that Hank Buchanan can arrange to turn himself in, but had not done so days later. I wonder how many of the rest of us would be granted this luxury? Bay Buchanan said it is a "terrible setback for Hank and his family." I gather she didn't feel it was a "setback" or a problem for the people in Shearer's house to be threatened at gunpoint.

-- Karen Goodrich
Bakersfield, Calif.

Wasn't Mike Barnicle fired from Boston's top newspaper for making up facts? Isn't Matthews making up facts when it comes to Shearer? How much credibility does Kathleen Willey have left? I think it's a shame that Barnicle lost his job but Matthews gets to retain his. I guess Boston has a great deal more character going for it than San Francisco does.

-- Carol Herman

Death of a cop show
BY JOYCE MILLMAN
(05/15/99)

Sure enough, a show worth watching, one with some real character development and creativity, bites the dust. Add my name to the list of people who protest the demise. I was waiting for "G" to have a poignant romance, for Falzone to realize he really doesn't love pallid Ballard very much, for Meldrick to get a new hat. These characters were real people. Help! There are some viewers out here who are not twentysomething. Do we have a voice?

-- Sue LaFever
Redmond, Wash.

Mr. Mom's world
BY DAVID CASE
(05/14/99)

As a stay-at-home dad for the past five years, I was pleased to see an article on my fellow SAHDs. I was, however, disappointed to see Salon perpetuate the stereotype of men as incompetent caregivers in the Drama Queen contest associated with the article.

This is not to say that we don't have bad days in our household -- days when nothing seems to go right, days when my sons are cranky or whiny or constantly getting into things, days when it's a struggle to get dinner prepared while keeping two active boys from injuring themselves or each other -- but those days are no different from what any other stay-at-home parent, male or female, contends with. I think that a more telling Drama Queen contest would be the worst day the wife of a stay-at-home dad has had without her husband around to help. After all, we SAHDs have a lot more contact with our children than our wives, we know our children's moods as well or better than they do, and we've dealt with far more poopy diapers that have leaked up to the earlobes.

-- Brian S. Minsker

Sex! How to write a magazine article about a magazine party
BY CINTRA WILSON
(05/19/99)

I hate POV. I hate Egg. It amazes me to this day that such magazines were funded, much less founded. I was forced to take these two brainless, insipid, publications when Spy went out of business. I got no letter from Spy. I got a blow-in card with my first copy of POV that said the rest of my subscription would be fulfilled by these morons.

Every issue has found its way, unread, into the recycling bin. I would have canceled, but I wanted them to eat the postage.

-- Michael Reed

Maybe Cintra doesn't want to be a hack magazine writer (I presume she did get paid for this article and wasn't just doing us all a community service), but what the hell made her so bitter? I've been to parties like this, but do we all need to give vent to our vitriol? Cintra really spoiled my day.

-- Alix Clark

The real Y2K bug
BY PAUL SAFFO
(05/18/99)

While I whole-heartedly agree with Paul Saffo's main premise, that the greatest danger of the impending Y2K computer bug is the expectation of disaster, and not the digital fallout in itself, I must contradict his belief that the arbitrary quantification of time is an ancient tradition. In fact, it is one of the defining and differentiating characteristics of the modern age, in all its various periods.

In the late 16th century, people had an acute awareness of the smaller, mechanical units of time, but not the larger chronological enterprise. And the "millennialists" of roughly 1,000 years ago are most likely a fiction, a revisionist history based on a cultural migration that occurred long after the turn of the first millennium. A thousand years ago, most of the population was ignorant of the calendar year. Jan. 1 had not yet been established as New Year's Day. Most people did not even celebrate their own birthday, but rather celebrated their Saint's Day. Time was counted in seasons. Religion and agriculture were the industries of the day and the only deadlines that had to be met were planting, the harvest and Sunday church attendance.

Many scholars assert that the first recognized decade was the "fin de sihcle" that Saffo mentions. The 1890s was a period of robust cultural self-criticism. The effects of the industrial revolution had taken strong hold over Europe and the United States. So the mechanical view of time had become the industrial view of time. People could see a decade's worth of progress (or regression) quite clearly, in the chocolate-brown pollution hovering over London, and could exercise the same kind of scrutiny over the impending centennial.

Western culture, for one reason or another, has always reacted to categorical technological changes by re-quantifying time and thereby asserting that it is limited. Agriculture brought us accounting of seasons, mechanization introduced us to seconds, minutes and hours, and industrialization inspired the creation of the concepts of the decade and the century. Now, the digital revolution has given us an excuse to treat the arbitrary demarcation of the millennium with a measure of real deliberation.

-- Chad Levinson
New York

The Great American Cross-Out
BY DAWN MacKEEN
(05/18/99)

I get very incensed when I read claptrap such as Dawn MacKeen wrote. Not crossing one's legs does not mean that one will automatically sit with legs spread wide open (Sorry, fellas). I don't appreciate being patronized with sensationalistic yellow journalism such as this.

-- Valerie Voight