George Bush's forestry plan does a nice job of opening up public lands to abusive logging practices, but it won't extinguish one wildfire or put out one house fire, Joshua Malbin writes in LA Weekly. "Bush would essentially give the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management license to do anything, provided it called what it was doing a 'fuels-treatment project.' Bush has made it clear he plans to use this license to dramatically increase logging, " Malbin writes. At the same time Bush manages to blame "radical environmentalists" and the Clinton administration for this summer's massive wildfires.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has signed a news rack law that regulates where newspaper boxes can be placed and how they must be maintained. Most newspapers in the city backed the legislation, which stops short of requiring modular commercial racks.
The first gay couple to have a commitment/civil union announcement published in the New York Times, Daniel Gross and Steven Goldstein, met through a personal ad in the Washington City Paper. According to the announcement, Gross's ad read: "Nice Jewish boy, 5 feet 8 inches, 22, funny, well-read, dilettantish, self-deprecating, Ivy League, the kind of boy Mom fantasized about." He got 35 responses and one lifetime commitment.
Howard Altman, executive editor of Philadelphia City Paper, describes for AJR how a Saint Jack's Bar ad featuring the Thai King in hip-hop regalia nearly severed relations between the United States and Thailand. "It certainly was not the first advertising complaint City Paper had ever received, considering that we once printed an ad for a bar depicting the Virgin Mary with udders," Altman writes. "But this complaint was different. It was from an unhappy representative of a foreign government."
The Portland Mercury just turned two, and its editor may sometimes act like a terrible two, Joseph Gallivan writes in the Portland Tribune. William Steven Humphrey's antics range from flinging gunpowder "snaps" around the room to performing obscene acts with the doorknobs at rival Willamette Week, Gallivan writes. "He's mature, and he's a little boy and he's a disgusting pervert all at once," Dan Savage tells Gallivan. "I admire how a fortysomething can use the word 'pee-pee' as much as he does," Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week, says.
A new wave of refugees in Baltimore could revitalize its struggling neighborhoods, Nicole Leistikow writes in Baltimore City Paper. Leistikow, who has volunteered for the International Rescue Committee, says an afternoon on a Baltimore street corner can show a "woman in flowing robes carrying groceries on her head; friends stopping on the sidewalk to chat in African-accented French; too-cool European teenagers trying to win an argument with their parents in Serbo-Croatian." Scenes like this are becoming familiar not only in major American cities. Even smaller towns are trying to attract immigrant energy.
“This book, I hope, is a book of encounters, none of them predictable,” novelist and music writer Jonathan Lethem writes in his introduction to “Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002.” Seven of the 28 articles in the collection were originally published in alternative newsweeklies, including The Village Voice, Chicago Reader and City Pages (Twin Cities).
