The S.F. Examiner ran a fun article that a number of my friends seem to have noticed. Modern Times Bookstore, on Valencia, is in trouble. Their recent sales are down significantly from last year. We San Franciscans know that Modern Times is the main, if not only, socialist bookstore in town.
The Examiner article considers several (frivolous) reasons for the decline in Modern Times' sales, from gentrification of 20th and Valencia to mainstreaming of lefty books into Borders.
The real reason is straight-forward. There is no intelligent thought on the left, nothing to write a book about.
On the popular side of leftism you have Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore hogging the territory. On the academic side you can’t find anyone left to read The Commodification of Gender Redaction in Global Orientalism.
Farewell Modern Times. I won’t miss you; I don’t miss Stalin, the Rosenbergs or your whole dishonest, failed enterprise.