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…