Week 1: Happy Birthday, Don.[more …]

Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit—the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don’t like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It’s cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics regard it as one of the best jazz albums ever made? What is it about Kind of Blue that makes it not just pleasant but important?On March 2, 1959, when its first tracks were laid down at Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio (the album would be released on Aug. 17), Charlie Parker, the exemplar of modern jazz, the greatest alto saxophonist ever, had been dead for four years, almost to the day. The jazz world was still waiting, longing, for “the next Charlie Parker” and wondering where he’d take the music.Parker and his trumpeter sidekick, Dizzy Gillespie—Bird and Diz, as they were called—had launched the jazz revolution of the 1940s, known as bebop. Their concept was to take a standard blues or ballad and to improvise a whole new melody built on its chord changes. This in itself was nothing new. But they took it to a new level, extending the chords to more intricate patterns, playing them in darting, syncopated phrases, usually at breakneck tempos.The problem was, Parker not only invented bebop, he perfected it. There were only so many chords you could lay down in a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar song, only so many variations you could play on those chords. By the time he died, even Parker was running out of steam.[more …]

The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal’s world-wide newsbox lead with the Obama administration giving its strongest signal yet that it may be ready to drop the idea of a government-run insurance option to compete with private companies as part of health care reform. On the Sunday talk show circuit, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that the so-called public option is “not the essential element” of the overhaul efforts, while White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said President Obama “will be satisfied” if there is “choice and competition” in the private insurance market.[more …]

The Los Angeles Times leads with a report on the burgeoning Republican resistance to healthcare reform – a campaign that’s energized the party’s base, but about which many party leaders remain deeply ambivalent. The so-called “August revolt,” powered by activists’ antics at Democratic town-hall meetings, has helped reinvigorate conservative groups; still, some GOP lawmakers are wary of associating themselves with the campaigners’ increasingly cartoonish attacks. “The hostility went straight through to hysteria,” said South Carolina conservative Rep. Bob Ingliss after being booed down at one recent town-hall. “You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible.”[more …]

The Washington Post leads with President Obama’s push for insurance reform on his swing through Western states, where he found a much gentler reception than many elected representatives. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times lead with new economic numbers that show steady consumer prices and little to no inflation, which could be evidence of an inflection point as the nosedive levels off—even as consumer confidence languishes. The Wall Street Journal leads with the failure of Alabama’s Colonial Bank, the biggest collapse since Washington Mutual and the sixth largest in U.S. history.[more …]

Prominent American food companies, including Kraft, General Mills, and Hershey, have warned the Department of Agriculture that there’s a deficit in the sugar supply and that we could ” virtually run out” in the near future. After the Wall Street Journal and a number of other news sources picked up the story on Thursday, the American Sugar Alliance countered that we’re far from a shortage; in fact, we have a surplus. Could we ever really run out of sugar?[more …]

Physicist Dave Goldberg has a fascinating Slate piece this week on how The Time Traveler’s Wife stacks up against other movies with a time-travel theme. In a survey of physicists’ speculations on the possibility of time travel, he mentions one theory involving “gargantuan cosmic strings […] of matter of almost unimaginable density and length.” That about sums up The Time Traveler’s Wife, adapted from Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling novel by Bruce Joel Rubin (who also wrote Ghost, another metaphysically inflected love story). I’ll take Goldberg’s word that the movie obeys the laws of Einsteinian physics (no alternate universes, you can’t change history, etc.), but it’s in flagrant violation of the rules of narrative logic, character development, or the most basic audience satisfaction.[more …]

Time on how the recession is killing Las Vegas.[more …]

The National Enquirer is reporting what everyone already knew—that John Edwards is in fact the father of Rielle Hunter’s child—and a North Carolina TV station says he may admit paternity. This news has been met largely with shrugs. Edwards is not only a failed candidate, he is a failed politician, with next to no influence among Democrats.[more …]

A daily video from Slate V.[more …]