To the Editor: I read with great interest "RIAA Threatens Music Downloaders" (March 29) and Ben Selznick's op-ed, "The Responsibility of the RIAA" (April 3). Both pieces will be required reading when I teach a first-year writing seminar next spring.
Our ongoing culture war over marriage for gays and lesbians bears striking resemblances to America's culture war over interracial marriage (also known as miscegenation, or the mixing of races). Like all analogies, there are differences as well as similarities, but perhaps we have not pressed the analogy far enough.
Anniversaries do not always neatly coincide with history, but invocations of the past often have much to say about the realities of the present. These thoughts came to mind as I was reading David Levering Lewis's biography of W.E.B.