Alaska needs cool heads now more than ever despite election yearBy TOM BRENNAN
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Daily Planet: BooksCold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of AlaskaUniversity of Alaska Press ($21.95) Michael Engelhard, editor By SCOTT BANKSYou can’t use the excuse that you don’t have time to read when it comes to flash fiction. It’s the new black in some literary circles and the University of Alaska Press recently released its answer to the genre, Alaska style. “Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska. Edited by Michael Engelhard, in the forward he recites the adage, “If you can't say it in a few pages, you won't in a hundred." The book matches black and white photos with spare prose, no more than 450 words, works of fiction and nonfiction, all with an Alaska theme. It’s up to the reader to decide if the work is fiction or nonfiction, and in the end, it doesn’t matter. (Disclaimer: I have an essay in the book.)This isn’t a book bound for the tourist rack, but it does present an honest view of life in Alaska. Engelhard writes, “There is birth here, and death, and the messiness in between, all with an unmistakable Northern Exposure twist.” There is memoir, like the opening piecek, “Labrador Tea,” by Eowyn Ivey, recalling her mother and the memories of being on the tundra with her. There is fictional piece, “Turnagain,” by Erin Wilcox, about fishing at Bird Creek and wandering too far out on the mudflats. Has congress become useless?By GENE HEALY |
I seem to be in a rather small minority, but the results of the Alaska Gasline Project open season announced last week looked encouraging to me. I was afraid the gas pipeline might be dead, killed by the AGIA poison pill, but the project seems to be very much alive.
Has Congress become "a useless appendix on the governmental structure"? That was what then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., feared in 1968, according to newly released transcripts from the committee's closed-session debates over Vietnam. Unless Congress was willing to assert itself on the war, he said, "I do not see how we have any real function."
It's the "worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," as President Obama describes it. Lesser mortals call it a "catastrophe" and "calamity." Some call the Gulf oil leak "doomsday for the Gulf of Mexico."
We live in a world of imperfect and costly information, and people seek to economize on information costs in a variety of ways. If we don't take that fact into account, we risk misidentifying and confusing one type of human behavior with another. Let's look at it.