But I don’t mind being called [angry]. I just don’t think it means anything. How can you have lived through the last ten years in American culture and not be? How can you not look at what happened on Wall Street, at this gamesmanship that was the mortgage bubble, that was just selling crap and calling it gold? Or watch a city school system suffer for twenty, twenty-five years? Isn’t anger the appropriate response? What is the appropriate response? Ennui? Alienation? Buying into the great-man theory of history—that if we only elect the right guy? This stuff is systemic. This is how an empire is eaten from within.

Guernica magazine shares an excellent Bill Moyers–interview of David Simon, creator of The Wire. Simon argues that the veneer used to hide our crumbling civil society no longer holds.

Friend Maggie Flynn has a thoughtful piece in Salon on being non-religious in the Bible belt.

Amid reports that the economy is adding jobs (even as unemployment in Illinois is still 9 percent), it’s nice to see the New York Times probe whether many of these jobs are providing enough income to live on.

In “Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs,” they conclude, “But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.” It’s a perspective that isn’t offered enough.

Head into the field with the latest issue of Lincoln Park Zoo magazine! See how zoo scientists protect wildlife from Africa to the zoo’s backyard. Download a PDF or browse the full issue.