salon.com

OMG, Salon's critics picks!

1. Andrew O'Hehir (how does one say his name?) writes about a movie about an intersex teenager. This looks like a great movie. We'll never, ever see it in Eugene. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure none of the other places I've lived, not including London, won't ever see it either.) Hm.

2. Heather Havrilesky links to List of the Day's best. list. evah.: Great Olan Mills Photos.

Don't know Olan Mills? I grew up with the joys of Olan Mills photos, and man, are you missing out. Sample, slightly misleading as it refers to 2006 and most of the examples show off the best of the decade in which I was born:

From Stephanie Zacharek's review of Lions for Lambs:

"Lions for Lambs" doesn't for a minute treat good citizenship as an easy or certain enterprise. It's easy to live up to diminished ideals; the hard part is rising to the lofty ones. Thanks to the imperfections of democracy, we'll never be able to live in the perfect country of our dreams. That's all the more reason to act like citizens of it.

("The imperfections of democracy" refers to an earlier-cited Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.")

What do y'all think? Where are our lofty ideals? How do we decide what it means to be a good citizen (and hey, what does that mean)?