This is such an important issue:

As part of a national round of soul-searching, French leaders are recognizing with unusual frankness that the country needs to do more to promote integration of Muslims and other children of immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy last week named Yazid Sabeg, a successful businessman born to Algerian immigrants, to head a government department assigned to get more minority candidates into politics and more minority students into the elite academies that turn out France’s leadership class.

This is beautiful:

Still, it strains belief

How an instant can dilate,

Or long years be brief.

Maybe.  I certainly hope so.  But I doubt it.  But maybe it’s on the way down because of the recession.  Anyways, this article claims its bubble popped:

By late December, even celeb site Jossip raised the white flag in a post called, “Gossip’s Dead and It’s Everyone’s Fault.” The item offered a brief summation of the fallen soldiers on the field: “Ben Widdicombe was the first to go, ankling his post as the New York Daily News’ most respected gossip columnist. Next were Rush & Molloy, the married gossips who since 1995 had also penned a column for the Daily News — they wanted to focus on other stories for the paper. Then Jo Piazza, whose scuttlebutt replaced Widdicombe’s, quit, too. Jossip’s gossip-oriented sister site Mollygood shut down, much like the short-lived PageSix.com before it. Also, tabloid sales continued to shrink.” Layoffs hit Gawker and its sister site Jezebel. TMZ, which had so zealously launched its own TV show in 2007, ended the year with a decrease in readership — a rare occurrence online, where new users appear by the minute. It seemed deeply symbolic when Mr. Blackwell — the bitchy tabloid queen responsible for “The Worst Dressed List,” a Schadenfreude tradition that gave birth to a gazillion “fashion police” — passed away in October. It was fitting, almost. The end of an era. Or, depending on your perspective — an error.

This is a great reflection, and quite open-minded, on whether or not games should be considered art.  It’s hard to imagine something like this being published in the the NYRB.  I really don’t know anything about video games (or not enough anyways), but this all sounds smart:

From the aesthetic point of view, a lot turns on whether games offer their users actual creativity, or whether it is just some horrible corporate simulacrum. The PS3 has a wonderful new game called LittleBigPlanet, in which you play a sock-like creature who travels through game levels full of puzzles and obstacles, and governed by fascinatingly realistic physics – and then offers you a full set of tools to design game levels of your own, and upload them for others to play. All the specifics of the levels are up to you; you can fill them with photos and music of your own choice, you can do whatever you like. That’s fun. Is it creative? I’m not sure: part of me wants to say that it isn’t, that nothing within a world so fully made by a corporation can be truly creative. But it isn’t so far off creativity, and it is possible to imagine a day in which games like this cross over to offer real freedoms, and therefore the real possibility to make something new, something of your own.

This makes me so angry.  These people were much, much more safe under Saddam.  I’m not saying I wish he were still in power.  I am saying that the Christians of Iraq are some of the oldest Christians in the world, and now they almost certainly can no longer live in their homeland.  It’s heartbreaking.  Read more here:

Christians in Iraq face a “bleak future,” said Kassab, executive director of the Chaldean Federation of America, a nonprofit group that helps Iraqi Christians.

“We are heading for a demise,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where it might be an ethnic cleansing in the future.”

A recent U.S. government report focused on the plight of Iraq’s Christian minority. U.S. diplomats and legislators are worried, too.

“I think the Christians are caught in the middle of a horrible situation,” said U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat of Assyrian and Armenian ancestry.

She said Iraqi Christians are suffering as a result of “religious cleansing,” and she has urged more help for minorities who have fled their homes in Iraq.

The Iraqi government has worked to be inclusive and accepting toward Christians, but daily intimidation has cowed the Christian community, with crosses removed from churches, priests afraid to wear their clerical garb, the faithful reluctant to attend church, and churches hiring private security guards.

Fringe has my vote.  Thoughts?

Slate shows that contrary to a NYT story, people aren’t going back to church as often anymore.  And then there’s a bit in Time about how, well, nobody goes to Church on Christmas.

First off, if I’m going to like Christmas music, it’s usually from my man Sufjan Stevens, whose Christmas albums are frickin’ great!  Here’s another one from Sufjan too, which is new, though techno-ish and I’m not sure about, but if you like techno, check out Good King W. here.

But besides Sufjan, honeslty, it’s hard for me to get into most Christmas music, which is often maudlin and sappy and just a bit pathetic.  But, well, somebody likes it, and he’s not even Christian.  Here’s why:

The genre’s animating nostalgia has only deepened as the years have passed. The songs became nostalgic in theme as well as fact. Every December, for a few weeks, the crooners rise from their graves, the past connects to the present, and we listen to the same music our parents heard, the same voices our grandparents remember. Bing Crosby and Gene Autry and Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and Dean Martin. That soft static in the background of the recordings is the song of continuity.

That, anyway, is what this Jew understands Christmas cheer to be. It warms the young man still chilled by the winters of Czarist Russia and welcomes even the cantor’s child. In that, the holiday’s essential nostalgia doesn’t erase its insistent relevance: America’s best ideals have remained constant across generations. Today’s immigrants will find themselves absently singing along to tunes written by yesterday’s immigrants, shoppers in red states will mouth the same classics as shoppers in blue states. It’s a holiday to which everyone can belong, which is why it took an outsider to define it. It’s Christmas as understood, and thus presented, by Irving Berlin, and everyone participates. I’m an unabashed admirer.

This is a valuable insight that ought not be forgotten: it is a good idea to ensure that blue collar workers can live middle-class lives.  I’m just not sure that companies can ensure that.

But, for all of Detroit’s mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this situation lies beyond Detroit.

A wise insight here:

But if Mendes’s new film is to do Revolutionary Road justice, it will transcend the easy anti-suburban categorization. While Yates’s depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs’s devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the ‘burbs. It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs.