Opinion: In today’s pages: Missile strikes, Starbucks, and Stein
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Author and UCLA lecturer Lawrence Grobel finds his past on sale at Amazon.com:
We printed 2,000 copies of each issue and sold them for 50 cents each. So, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that Amazon.com had a listing under my name that said: ‘SATYR . Paperback. Used. $366.’$366! Was this a joke?I went to the site offering the three issues for sale, and sure enough, it was for real. Only at Zubal.com they were listed at $348.20. It was also offering a first edition of my 812-page biography, ‘The Hustons,’ for $1.
Columnist Joel Stein discovers a shady journalistic cover-up: celeb mag editors-at-large aren’t really editors, they just play them on TV. Human Rights Watch’s Jennifer Daskal and Leslie Lefkow say that U.S. policy suffers when missile strikes on alleged terrorists go awry.
The editorial board criticizes John McCain’s answer to the credit crisis, examines what lies ahead for new UC President Mark Yudof, and hails Starbucks and the upscaling of America:
[T]he Starbucks model -- a global-village blend of faux-Italianate lingo, American efficiency and post-modern abundance of selection, all built on the easy international flow of coffee beans -- is everywhere, readily reproduced by McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and any old bodega.It’s the happy flip-side of living in a country where even the poor people are fat.
On the letters page, readers discuss Jonah Goldberg’s column claiming we were having a race conversation long before Barack Obama’s speech. Phil Boiarsky of Columbus, Ohio disagrees, saying, ‘ I am 63 years old, and this is the first time I have heard the ‘white’ side of the issue.’