It's been a long while since any of us have received a “five things” meme! Jordan Furlong of Law 21 tagged Susan Carter Liebel of Build a Solo Practice who tagged me, as did Diane Levin at the Mediation Channel (tagged by anonymous Ed. at Blawg Review).

As Susan explains:

The idea is to post links to five great blogs (other than law blogs) on your blawg and tag five of your favorite blawgers to do the same under the post title ‘5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers.'

I'm tagging the following 20-something law bloggers to pick up the meme before I fulfill my own meme-blagations: 

 Brett McKay at The Frugal Law Student, Erin Morgan at Life of a Law Student, any of several bloggers in their 20's at Fight the Hypo; The Anonymous Deaf Law Student; and Bekki at Nuts and Boalts.

I'm in New York City

where labor unions still celebrate Labor Day (above)

My meme delay is largely to to the fact that my computer crashed (below).  The screen wouldn't even go on.  Sigh. 

(note my new diet)

So I wrote this post on napkins at the Cafe Europa at 6th and 46th, just two blocks from the office building where I typed in a typing pool '75-'76 and then worked as a paralegal (Shepardizing the old way) '76-'77.  

The City is a crystalline container of my youth.

It makes me think of my first husband, the social worker and his friends the community organizers and my days in the "New" Left , which retreated into our universities and was granted tenure during the Reagan Revolution ("drug store truck drivin' man")

where it irrirtated or enraged subsequent generations of "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" University students.  American Universities - the mausoleum of the "New" Left.

(the German voice over stops when Baez begins to sing).

I don't want to send you to blogs.  I want to send you to the very few magazines of general circulation that not only recall phrases like "activism," "community organizing," "grass roots" and the grimly prescient "military industrial complex."  (President, War Hero and General Dwight D. Eisenhower) but still actually use them (don't worry, I'm not sending you to Mother Jones or In These Times). 

I'm going to tag five 20-someting bloggers in an attempt to break through my own habits of mind and ask them to send me to five new places that represent progress or change or simply another way of looking at the same old issues at depth.

(above:  my Central Park flag lapel pin so you won't think I don't love America)

Here are the Five (non)Blogs If You Want to Skip the Overly Long NYC Windup

Harpers, particularly Lewis Lapham's rants against business-as-usual and things-as-they-are.  There's in-depth investigative reporting on the Bush Administration's war on the rule of law or the privatization of the public schools.  It's always a little depressing because it generally reminds you how little you know no matter how you try to stay tuned in and how little power the electorate has.  Readings, from the surreal to the truly terrifying, sometimes both at once (sorry, but these require a subscription, well worth the investment).

The New Yorker.  I know.  Thisis predictable but you have to read the foreign policy articles to know what's really going on.  And this is from the point of view of the "establishment."  Like this one about Abu Ghraib that went beyond the photos and the headlines.  This 2003 article on the occupation of Iraq is one of those pieces of journalism that made me realize just how little I knew and how much more I needed to.  The only way to deal with the relentlessness of a weekly New Yorker subscription.  Throw the magazine out when the next one comes whether you've read it or not.

The LA Weekly.  I'm sure you have a journal like this in your town. The local entertainment scene.  Personal ads.  And admirably decent political reporting performed by what we used to call the "alternative press."  (maybe they still do).

The London Review of Books.  If you're looking for a little anti-Americanism, this journal is for you.  I tired of it after 9/11, but it was and is a tonic to navel gazing Americans who can't imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us.  The other problem with this journal is that you have to have been smart enough to have actually understood the entire Joyce oeuvre to grasp it, Finnegan's Wake.  I was a LIT-TRA-CHUR major at a fine University and I just never understood most of what was printed here.  Still, it's worth recommending to anyone who might.

Granta.  It's a quarterly literary journal out of Britain but it's not, you know, difficult.  The issue titled What We Think of America (self-described below) made me angry, sad, joyful, perplexed and grateful.  And Granta accomplishes this nearly every issue.  Check out the issue on Factories, particularly the Isabel Hilton's article Made in China and the View from Africa.  Granta makes me think things I haven't thought before.  And when you're 50+ that's more than a plus.  It's a revelation.