September 18, 2007

The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone, and the storm’s devastation continues to take its toll—sometimes in ways that are the consequence of human negligence, indifference, incompetence and just plain stinginess. For example, ongoing investigations by several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have revealed that the hastily and cheaply made mobile housing units provided to hurricane evacuees by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) contain dangerously high levels of formaldehyde.

Our culture’s ever-increasing individualism is about to take a decisive turn. Any day now self-checkout lanes in our stores will outnumber the lanes that lead shoppers to a human cashier. At that point, “going to the market” will become a solitary enterprise.

At age 12 Lionel Tate killed his six-year-old playmate. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Five years later, in 2004, appellate courts overturned Tate’s conviction, and a plea bargain led to his release. But in 2005 he was arrested again for robbing a pizza delivery man, and he is now spending 30 years in prison.

The immensely exciting Bourne trilogy, culled from Robert Ludlum’s best sellers, builds to a satisfying conclusion in The Bourne Ultimatum, which ties together the arcs of The Bourne Identity (in which amnesiac CIA “black ops” agent Jason Bourne attempts to find out who he is) and The Bourne Supremacy (about his drive to track down the CIA higher-up responsible for murdering his girlfriend, Marie Kreutz).