One real entry and two unrelated notes:

• I read a piece over the weekend in the July Atlantic Monthly about how the displacement of the poor by tearing down ghettoes (brought about by the success of the "Section 8" plan wherein the working poor could receive vouchers for rent in middle-class apartment communities) has had the unintended result of increasing the crime rate throughout medium-sized cities, and in particular the city of Memphis. The article was interesting and drew a reasonable (but hardly concrete) path of causality between the two, with no solutions proposed, but what interested me was how much the writer got absolutely wrong about Memphis geography.
  
  Residents of north Memphis are depicted as shopping at Safeway, a grocery chain that doesn't actually have locations in Memphis (there's one listed on Google Maps, but I would wager that it's a mistake--there is no economy of scale in opening a single grocery store in one of the poorest sections of town in south Memphis).
  
  Rhodes College is portrayed as "a college on a hill," which is poetic but wrong. Rhodes, like everything else in Memphis sits on a bluff that was formerly a flood plain. We have nothing that would qualify as a hill in town, except the bluff itself. And Rhodes is nowhere near it.
  
  Why do this? What is gained by fabricating inconsequential details of a story, except to cast doubt on the validity of the story as a whole?
  
  Unfortunately, the story's not online (yet), so unless folks reading this also read the paper version of The Atlantic Monthly, disscussion of the article itself will have to wait. It certainly bears discussing, though.
  
  Edit: Online now. Read. Let's discuss.


• Mrs. Cwabs is directing a local production of Little Shop of Horrors. I've taken to singing "Somewhere That's Green" in a Dr. Girlfriend voice (is she Dr. Wife now?)


• Junot Diaz has now won the Pulitzer and The James Beard Award in the same year. Somewhere, Michael Chabon is crying.