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Osama Van Halen

Amazing Ayyub, an Iranian Shi'ite skinhead, and Rabeya, a burqa-wearing punk, have kidnapped Matt Damon and are holding him hostage. They demand that Hollywood depict Muslims in a positive light—“just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional al Qaeda stereotypes.” But Damon's concerned they're playing into that same terrorist paradigm, thereby furthering the neoconservative perception of Islam. Meanwhile, Ayyub embarks on a mission to rid the taqwacore scene of a Muslim pop-punk band called Shah 79. Along the way, he makes himself invisible, escapes punk-eating zombies in a mosque off the desert highway, and runs into some psychobilly jinns. Things turn existential when Ayyub finds himself face-to-face with his creator—no, not Allah, but the author. This riotous journey of enlightenment reads like a religious service for teenagers on Halloween. But it isn't all raucous fun; written into his own novel, the author finds he is at the mercy of his creation.

... assumed Osama bin Laden's role as head of Al-Qaeda. I imagined Amazing
Ayyub reading his biography through repeated trips to Barnes & Noble, where he'
d keep dog-earing pages on the same copy to save his place. “Zarqawi does not
intend to make a career,” writes Jean-Charles Brisard. “What he is trying to do is
take revenge on life.” Ayyub might have gotten into this guy, too, at least until the
part where it's shown that Zarqawi hates Shi'as. Born Ahmad Fadil, Zarqawi was
 ...

The Day After The Day After

My Atomic Angst

Steven Church grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety—and a place that, since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in the popular imagination. Childhood was quiet on the surface, but Steven grew up scared—scared of killer tornadoes, winged monkeys, violent movies, authority figures, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, and most of all in Reagan’s America, nuclear war. His fantasies of nuclear meltdown, genetic mutation, and post-apocalyptic survival find a focal point in 1982 when filming begins in Lawrence for The Day After, a film which would go on to become the second-highest Nielsen-rated TV movie. Despite cheesy special effects, melodramatic plotlines, and the presence of Steve Guttenberg, the movie had an instant and lasting impact on Church, and an entire generation. Combining interview, personal essay, film criticism, fact, and flights of imagination, Church’s richly layered and darkly comic memoir explores the meaning of Cold War fears for his generation and their resonance today.

I also learned how in one skirmish south of Lawrence, near the Kansas–Missouri
border, John Brown and a band of followers descended on a small community
supposedly dominated by proslavery sympathizers. He and his men rode in on
horseback, attacking the mostly defenseless farmers, hacking dozens of them to
death with broadswords and machetes. By most accounts, Brown was also a
raving homicidal lunatic. But he was our raving homicidal lunatic. We loved him
for the ...

Understanding the Crash

Understanding the Crash starts with a simple question that still haunts us all: What has happened to the world economy? With the kind of striking precision that only graphic nonfiction can provide, Seth Tobocman and Eric Laursen explain just how we got into this mess — and how we can get out of it. Looking back across more than a quarter century, the authors outline the roots of our current economic crisis. They show how the troubles of a working-class community in Cleveland or a newly built suburb of Miami became an international financial crisis, explaining the complex new forms of credit that came into being because of financial deregulation, and how they created an economic whirlpool. From there they discuss how, over the same time span, a smaller and smaller group of people came to control a larger and larger percentage of the world’s money — a result of rising inequality that, combined with the shortage of affordable housing, a decline in real wages, and our unwavering belief in an “ownership society,” impelled poor people into debt. Tobocman and Laursen conclude with a consideration of a restructured financial system and a look toward a culture of sustainability — one that covets real wealth in the form of security, meaningful work, and community.

Dedicated to our grandparents, who were witness, to the Great Depression:
Rosemary Wehrle, Maryjane Finlay, Tage Laursen, Dagmar Jensen Laursen,
Harold Sherwin, and Edna Crow Sherwin (Above: portrait of Helen Tobocman,
painted ...