Free Tuition for All!

After hours of watching the Republican and Democratic party conventions, I have a question. Many questions, actually.  

Some candidates want college tuition to be free for every student whose family earns less than $125,000 per year. How much will that cost taxpayers? Who will bear the tax burden, and what programs will have to be cut to avoid increasing the federal budget deficit? Would you prefer to have free tuition or universal health care, if you had to pick one or the other? Subsidies for renewable energy? Free solar panels for everyone, even people in Cleveland? Should we cut spending on defense, law enforcement and border control to accommodate these social policy objectives? 

Will the free tuition be available to students who have low standardized test scores and can't handle the class work? Students who don't go to class? Children of illegal immigrants? Or US citizens only? 

Is $125,000 the right threshold? Or should it be much lower, perhaps $50,000 or whatever the official poverty level is today? But wait, don't poor people already get help with college tuition? 

My opinions aren't important. But whoever we elect had better be up to the challenge of grappling with these issues. 

That's it. It's time to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.

Unfriended

The plot of Unfriended (available on HBO Go) is easy to grasp, but this film is unconventional to say the least. It takes place entirely on a teenage girl’s computer screen.

In this modern update of a time-tested formula, a girl spends an evening home alone, chatting with her friends on social media. A stranger joins their chat session, taunting them as tension builds. Who is this sinister stalker who won’t go away. He/she is a stranger who thinks they were involved in a cyberbullying incident -- but were they? Once the teens discover that the stranger cannot be "unfriended," it’s not long before hysterical, shrieking mayhem ensues.

For those who like messages in their movies, this one’s simple: if your children or grandchildren are online and unsupervised, they aren't safe, even in a quiet, guard-gated community like mine. 

Unfriended is unique in that literally everything is depicted through the lens of Skype, Facebook, Twitter and a dizzying array of other computer applications. The only view we have of the characters is through split-screen shots of young people staring at their webcams. There is spoken dialogue, but we’re also required to read the contents of web pages, text boxes and search engines.

At first I thought this was merely an opening gimmick. But to my surprise, it went on for the entire film. The fact that a film producer saw commercial potential here says a lot about how social media has infiltrated young peoples' lives.

Teenagers will like Unfriended for its cheap thrills, youthful characters and contemporary twist. Parents and grandparents will find themselves on familiar ground, because this film has its roots in the teen horror/slasher film tradition which began way back in the 1980s, with films like Halloween, Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Ah, memories. A sequel, Unfriended 2, is planned. 

Gray Mountain

By John Grisham
Doubleday, 368 pp. 

• ISBN: 978-0-385-53714-8

• 
  

John Grisham is a novel-writing machine, having pumped out some 29 books since his first, A Time to Kill, in 1988. For such a productive writer, coming up with great plot ideas must be a challenge. His fans will not be disappointed with Gray Mountain, in which an inexperienced young lawyer takes on ruthless coal mining companies with deadly results. 

In Grisham’s tale, attorney Samantha loses her job with a prestigious New York law firm during the 2008 financial crisis. With nothing better on the horizon, she goes to work in a legal aid office in coal country – western Virginia, that is. There she learns of the evils of strip mining, mountaintop removal and black lung disease. Outraged, Samantha teams up with crusading environmental activists who fight back in unorthodox ways. 

Readers of Grisham’s past work will recognize one of his favorite themes: small-time lawyers struggle heroically against big, bad corporations who run roughshod through people’s lives. Throw in some colorful rural characters, vicious meth dealers and a rogue lawyer, and you’ve got another sure-fire page turner. I read most of this book on a plane to and from the east coast, and wasn’t bored for a moment. 

What drew me to it? Simple: I was seeking local color. The novel takes place largely in what Grisham terms “Appalachia.” I lived and worked in the region for seven years. Our western Pennsylvania town had its heyday 100 years ago, when the steel mills and glass factories were thriving. So were the coal mines, which provided the fuel both industries (and the electric utilities) needed. Nowadays most of the mines in western Pennsylvania are closed, but the evidence of them is all around if you know where to look, in place names, coal patch hamlets and the orange water that seeps out of abandoned mines. 

My fondness for the region is perhaps the source of my issue with this book: it contains too many sweeping statements as to how coal mining companies break every rule in the book. Surely they cannot all be as bad as he depicts them.

Links
Washington Post review
Kirkus review,