From TAP, the Militarist: John McCain may protest that he hates war, but no American leader has promoted it more avidly. Drawing lessons: What arts education can do, and can’t; and forget the art-school aesthetic: Photo-sharing Web sites have their own ideas about beauty. People think Colson Whitehead has it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black. A review of The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll (and more and more and more and more). Scourge of the corporate pirates: The artist's enemy is obscurity, not piracy, says novelist and Web activist Cory Doctorow. Triple-A Failure: How Moody’s and other credit-rating agencies licensed the abuses that created the housing bubble — and bust. An article on Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale. In the end, every president talks to the bad guys: A primer on confronting evil dictators. Only the men survive: Aggressive and blunt, Morgan Stanley’s Zoe Cruz didn’t act like a typical female pioneer in a masculine world — and that rubbed a lot of men, who later got her fired, the wrong way. Doris Lessing is still raging — at communists, war, Mrs Thatcher... but most of her venom is reserved for the subject of what she says will be her final book: Her mother (and here is the Bookforum interview).
