Quick hits

The Portland Press Herald weighs-in on the study suggesting that Americans prefer TV over national parks visits. The study in question is noted in this press release.

The Maine Sunday Telegram featured this story as its lead yesterday, looking at the tension between Lewiston's old French community and its burgeoning Somali one. A recent incident in which an idiot identifying with the former tossed a pig wrapped in a head-dress into a mosque during worship time re-raises the question. A fellow blogger at Words Matter discussed the issue a few days before the Telegram published its story.

Here's a Boston Globe Sunday Magazine piece excerpting a book about the Theo Epstein-Larry Lucchino squabble of last off-season.

Washington Post's The Fix has an exclusive interview with Sen. John McCain about the 2008 Presidential election.

NY Times' Adam Cohen reflects on the first year of the Roberts Court, suggesting that the new CJ seems to have forgotten his confirmation hearings' promise to remain judicially modest.

The Washington Post also features a remembrance of Tom Wolfe's tenure at the paper before he hit it big with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, et al. It includes several Wolfe-ishly blissful turns of phrase, such as:

• Two muggers gave their victim "a black eye big as an eggplant."
• Zeroes in a budget stretched on "like so many eggs in a hatchery."
• A shopkeeper flashed a smile "you could hang the wash on."
• Neighborhood gossip ran "free as the back-wash from a pig train to Secaucus."
• Washington was "the city where everybody represents somebody else."
• "Rome now makes half as many movies as Hollywood, and every other one is about a prostitute."
• Thus Wolfe depicted the gunman in a botched liquor store robbery as "slightly built and snappy-talking." Seven paragraphs later: "Turner retreated but now the truck pulled up. Snappytalk opened fire."

The New York Times Sunday Magazine gets serious about the immigration and the American economy.