"I love Joplin! I love Joplin." So began President Obama in his Sunday address to the town of Joplin, Missouri, smudged from the face of the earth by a tornado a week before.

"I love you, Obama!" yelled a Joplin resident in the audience.

While there is much hope to be had in Joplin's will to rebuild, there is even more to be found in the obliterated town's welcoming of Obama. About a century ago, a Joplin lynch mob attempted to drive every last African-American resident out of town, and pretty much succeeded.

It's been a long time since an African-American publicly loved Joplin, or vice versa. READ MORE

I've always kind of liked the moon. And have felt an instinct toward protection when friends and colleagues have attacked her in print. What did the moon ever do to us, I thought, except look pretty and give us tides to surf on and write nice faux-reggae songs about? Well, it turns out that the less credulous among us may have been right not to trust her seductive blue glow after all. The moon has been holding out on us for years, hoarding vast supplies of valuable water beneath her apparently dry, desert-like surface. Scientists started to suspect something was up recently. But now, new analysis of volcanic moon rock brought back by astronauts 40 years ago has yielded evidence of far more water than we'd ever imagined! READ MORE

And so, five quick guidelines for summer dressing—from head to toe. All over your body, as the poet sang. READ MORE

"My end goal, besides integrating all the disparate elements as smoothly as possible, was to capture the stark, somber beauty of I’m New Here—a challenge because the album was so uniquely a piece of its own, an emotional open wound sonically unlike anything he’d recorded before. But I thought it came out well. As it so happened the mix wound up getting lost in the sauce in the run-up to I’m New Here's release. With yesterday’s heart-breaking news of Gil Scott-Heron’s passing, I thought I’d post it up here to share, a brief homage to this legendary artist/activist/thinker, and his brilliant final project."
—If you're looking to listen to some Gil Scott-Heron (always a good idea, but particularly so today) you could do much worse than this mix that ego trip's Chairman Mao made for XL Records last year. The Soul Sides site rounds up a few other tributes, too. It's really a great, great loss. READ MORE

Famous story, here recounted by The Daily News:

Harold Brodkey used to tell the tale of how legendary New Yorker magazine editor William Shawn handled his use of a four-letter word: It's up to you, Shawn said, but would you rather be remembered for your story or the first use of that word in this magazine? Brodkey spiked the offending expletive.

Shawn was indeed vigilant against vulgarity. It's said that, being afraid of elevators, he used to carry a hatchet in his briefcase in case he was ever trapped inside one. But I like to think the weapon served also as a warning to staffers who did not get the message: This is a clean magazine!

As it happens, Shawn was not the last New Yorker editor averse to the baser corners of the language. A dirty little secret of The New Yorker archives: his successors, Gottlieb, Brown and Remnick, are only slightly less so. Forthwith, a compendium of New Yorker firsts in vulgarity. READ MORE

Bank of America is paying just $20 million for having foreclosed improperly on 160 active-duty military service personnel. (This, of course, was frequent predatory lender suit-settler Countrywide in action; Bank of America purchased Countrywide in January, 2008, for $4.1 billion in stock, and has paid for it more and more ever since, including the former CEO's SEC settlements.) But $20 million! That's nothing, in the grand scheme of the forthcoming housing disaster. For one thing, there are about half as many foreclosed houses being sold now as there were two years go: at this new pace, "it would take exactly three years to clear the current inventory of 1.9 million properties already on the banks’ books, or in foreclosure." And then there will be no houses in foreclosure! Just kidding. There'll be tons more! Both new ones, and let's not forget that litigation has stalled a huge number of foreclosures. All that will get dumped on the market, even as housing prices are down 33.1 percent from summer of 2006 and 28% of all single-family mortgages are underwater.