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    New Technology, the Economy, and the Difficulty of Change

    THE MUSIC INDUSTRYThe American popular music business is not what it once was When digital technology in the form of CD ripping and file sharing ravaged the music industry, I did not mourn. I would see all my high school students take their music collection out of their backpacks and all the CDs were copied, and I would just cheer inwardly. “Yeah, America! Pirate away!” When album sales plunged and the record companies lost billions, I applauded. “Couldn’t happen to nicer people!” I thought to myself. I had always figured there was a level of hell reserved for greedy, exploitative music executives. A few years later it happened to the…

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    Feeling Vulnerable

    A DYING CHILDCheryl and Michael Haggard cradle their son, Maddux, before he died at six days old in 2005. I read an article in the newspaper this morning about “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”, an organization that helps parents to grieve the deaths of their infants by taking high-quality photographs of them. The article and photographs left me in tears in the booth of the restaurant where I habitually sprawl out and read my three Sunday newspapers. It has been like this for some time, and I don’t completely understand it. Whenever I read about a stillborn child or see a couple pushing a Down’s Syndrome baby in…