Perhaps we should begin with an offering from Goldman Sachs he covered closely, the Abacus deal, for which Goldman was fined. Mr. Cohan, please explain whether you believe Goldman was guilty of unethical or illegal activity in the sale of Abacus. Ultimately, I hope we get your views on why there have been no convictions, and why.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Fondly nostalgic without ever descending into weepy misty water-colored memories, Lucking Out is populated with a who’s who of the 70′s culture explosion when a new breed of critics reinvented the rules, rock and roll collapsed inward upon itself and reemerged angry and raw, and porn stuck its head out from behind the peepshow curtains and found out that the time was right to come out and play with the non-raincoat crowd.

Beginning with the literary force of nature that was Norman Mailer whose letter of recommendation put Wolcott on the road to what should have been perdition, we also encounter Mailer’s bête noire Gore Vidal, Alfred Kazin, Groucho Marx (describing Marilyn Monroe as having “square tits”), Clay Felker, Robert Christgau ( the “self-proclaimed, scepter-wielding Dean of American Rock Critics” working the kitchen like June Cleaver while wearing only a pair of red sheer bikini underwear), Ellen Willis, Paulene Kael (whose presence permeates almost every page and to whom an entire section is devoted), Lucian Truscott IV, Joan Didion (wickedly eviscerated and hung out to dry by Kael), William and Wallace Shawn, Al Goldstein, Ed Asner, James Toback, Harold Brodkey, Andrew Sarris (whose entourage played the Sharks to Kael’s Paulette-Jets in a critics dance of death), David Lynch, Suzanne Farrell, Alene Croce, George Balanchine, Gelsey (“A name that falls in the mind’s ear like a sprig of mint”) Kirkland, Ugly George (a paleolithic Joe Francis armed with a shoulder-mounted camera and a perpetual hard-on), Tom Verlaine, John Cale, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, The Ramones, Lester Bangs, and of course, Patti Smith.

What could possibly make a human being torture another human being?

That’s a question that, as a young boy, I recall asking my grandparents—Holocaust survivors—after they described to me in vivid detail the torture they and other members of my extended family were subjected to by the Nazis during World War II.

It’s a question I returned to earlier this year when I had the opportunity to interview a veteran of the US Army Reserves who was torn up about the torture he says he witnessed and participated in against some “war on terror” detainees while serving as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. [That guard, Pfc. Albert Melise, has since been barred from reenlistment for speaking to me.]

Just last week, the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) released the results of its most recent study of the health care systems in the 40 counties considered to be “developed.” It came as no surprise to see that the U.S. health care system—if we can even call it a system—is still by far the most expensive on the planet.

We spend two-and-a-half times more on health care per person than the OECD average.

After reading Dr. John Geyman’s latest book, Breaking Point—How the Primary Care Crisis Endangers the Lives of Americans, I now understand why and how we have sunk so low.

A president elected in reaction to the economic and political environment. A president hated on the left for lack of bold action and accused by the right of being a socialist. A president who appears to struggle with any sort of confrontation within his own Administration and who appears to have continuing issues with quality of staffers. A president accused of promoting class warfare and ‘uncertainty’. A president with a justice on the Supreme Court who opposes him named Roberts. A president with a wife who is, to many, as controversial as he is. A president and an Administration during a time when bold decisive action is required, but who seem to suffer from chronic timidity.

Obama or Roosevelt? Both?

Kalleberg’s solution requires rethinking the social contract, a tough sell in individualistic America. He refers to the European concept of “flexicurity,” which seeks to combine employer flexibility with worker security. Doing so requires rethinking the relationship between public and private. The essential elements of such a model require universal, affordable, portable health insurance which ideally should be separated from employment. It also requires a more secure and portable pension system, more generous unemployment insurance, and greater opportunities to acquire new skills and education over the course of a lifetime. If employment is more transient and employers invest little in their workers, then a revitalized social safety net needs to fill in the gaps.

One might note that the high point of American power (absolute as opposed to relative, after the collapse of the USSR) coincides with peak of oil production in the US, and that the sudden rise in American pathologies coincides fairly closely with the oil crises of the 70s and early 80s, for example. Hustling, eternal growth, works when cheap energy is readily available, when more, more, more is possible, and when growth is choked, the hustlers, rather than growing the pie, turn on each other in a vicious “war of all against all”.

Crude Awakening explains the growing pains and tribulations of a new state coming of age in the modern era – a state of wilderness, and Sourdoughs, thousands of years of Native culture, fishermen, prospectors and pioneers, brilliant minds and brave souls writing their own Constitution. In some ways comparable to the spirit of newness, hope and optimism of Philadelphia in the 1830s, Alaska’s coming out party had a darker and more raucous side.