LATEST ADDITIONS

I spent a part of this morning sitting in the warm lobby of 10 Exchange Place in downtown Jersey City, waiting for FedEx to open. I had some gear to return. While I waited, I decided to listen to music. I undid the two front latches on my black canvas bag. From one pocket, I pulled out <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/052407eliminate/">the Red Wine Audio iMod</a>, from the other I removed <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/030107shure/">the Shure SE310 earphones</a>.

I've been telling you&mdash;I've been telling <i>everyone</i>, actually&mdash;that old-style New York City salsa is making a major comeback. Major.

Back when I worked at the lower Broadway Tower Records, those crazy cut-ups in the Classical Annex culled the stupidest, most cheesecakey covers from the used bins and covered a wall-of-shame in the count-out room with them.

I'm a huge fan of Martin Puryear's sculpture, having discovered it at a 1987 Hirschhorn retrospective. So I've been <I>meaning</I> to catch up with his current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Arthur C. Danto's <A HREF="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071231/danto">appreciation</a&gt; in <I>The Nation</I> serves not only as a stimulus to hie me hence forthwith, but also as a meditation on MOMA's second-floor atrium.

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One of my very favorite television shows is <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/sunday/main3445.shtml"><i>Sunday Morning</i></a> on CBS. I look forward to it all week long, and when I wake on Sunday mornings, it's the first thing that comes to mind. I usually wake with just enough time to brew a pot of coffee and get comfortable in front of the television.

Today in <I>Slate</I> (which, as some of you know, is where I do most of my writing, mainly on national-security politics), I lay out—as I have in each of the last five Decembers—my <A HREF= "http://www.slate.com/id/2180205/"&gt; picks</A> for the 10 best jazz albums of the year. Here are the best of 2007:

Helen A. S. Popkin has written a fine <A HREF="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22251370/">opinion piece</A> on the new, phenomenally wrong-headed Congressional Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO-IP Act), which among other things (such as absurd penalties) includes a spanking new enforcement agency called WHIPER (White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative).

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Andrew Ferguson has written a <A HREF="http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-11/Interview.html">highway history</A> of Abraham Lincoln. Among other observations, he points out that the man who "waged one of the most savage wars in our history" was definitely <I>not</I> non-judgmental.