Required Reading: 5 Great Essays from Summer 2010

In the virtual and hardcopy seas of so much slush, Good Writing is a rare and rarefied feat commensurate with Good Conversation or Good Sportsmanship or Good Sex. It is, to say the least, all any of us can ask for.

The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus

But, in a world that craves and covets pretty babies like Miley, is it indeed so very wrong for little girls in the limelight to exploit their big-girl sex-appeal for pay? Is it fair for their kiddie-careers to be so picked-on and politicized?

The United States of Tara: Bitch / Lover / Child / Mother

The show is carried by the actress Toni Collette, who plays “Tara,” a Kansas City mother and wife with a serious case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. That said, she is also “T,” a sex-minded teenage troublemaker; “Buck,” a lecherous Vietnam-vet; “Alice,” a prim and proper model of Stepfordesque matriarchy; “Gimme,” an Id-indulgent wild-thing; “Shoshana Schoenbaum,” a stuck-in-the-Seventies self-analyzing psychoanalyst; and “Chicken,” a reverie to the five-year-old Tara of yore.