Discourse

The English language has been the main craft tool of my life - and a great love as well. Happily, I read books and write about them for a living. When one is splendid literature or presents illuminating contemporary or historical insight, I celebrate it on these pages. Thus, as you read on, you'll understand why I can't remember a book that has more distressed and depressed me than Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, by John McWhorter (Gotham, 304 pages, $26)

ONCE THERE was hope, and now all hope is gone. Once there was laughter and blue skies and the trilling of songbirds, but now there is only gloom and despair and endless misery. Now men with rheumy eyes and The Wall Street Journal folded neatly on the seat next to them stare out the window at great clouds of exhaust fumes and wonder where it all went wrong. Now women with cell phones at one ear and Starbucks' double lattes in the cup-holder drum their lacquered fingernails on the steering wheel and wonder what vengeful god they've offended in order to be sentenced to such an unbearable existence.

WASHINGTON -- They lined up one by one at the microphone -- students, teachers, retirees, a Holocaust survivor, a Quaker -- voicing anxious questions and edgy suspicions about the war in Iraq and what the future might hold for U.S. forces there. Doubts and fears dominated as about 75 Marylanders gathered in the Towson University Union on Monday night with Democratic Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin of Baltimore to debate what the U.S. role should be in Iraq once the war ends. Cardin's gathering was pegged specifically to the conflict in Iraq.

CHICAGO -- Former newspaper reporter and television correspondent Michele Norris was at Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications when she encountered a display for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, for which she had just been hired as co-host. Seeing it enshrined in the museum's Radio Hall of Fame, she said, left her a little breathless. "After listening to the show almost all my adult life, realizing I'm going to be part of that daily conversation with 12 million listeners is the most exciting part of my journalism career," she said.

Douglas B. Riley, the Republican candidate for Baltimore County executive, has lived in Towson for 20 years, but the Massachusetts native still has a little North Attleboro in him. His upbringing in the tiny Boston suburb has left him with a slight accent in his speech - he still says gohvmint rather than government - and on his politics. While his Democratic opponent, James T. Smith Jr., comes form an old Reisterstown family steeped in the local rec council and political club, Riley displays something of an outsider's perspective.

It started with the hyperkinetic energy of Fox News and ended with the soothing back-and-forth cadence of CSPAN's Book Notes. Yet the inaugural episode of Wall Street Week with Fortune suggests that, as advertised, it is possible to have a thoughtful and watchable financial news program without the puns and punditry of one Louis Rukeyser, the deposed king of the PBS show's original version. The program's producer, Maryland Public Television, has held out new hosts Geoffrey Colvin and Karen Gibbs as the Oscar and Felix of the financial set: Colvin is to be more analytical, Gibbs more expressive.

Until he died last year, British writer and teacher Malcolm Bradbury served as a kind of scholarly diplomatic envoy to the free world: a prolific, inspired translator of academese into rich but digestible everyday discourse (fictional and critical). Once again in his energetic posthumous novel "To the Hermitage" (Overlook, 498 pages, $27.95), Bradbury manages to make big ideas not only relevant but riotous. Two parallel journeys take place in the novel. One has a fictional Malcolm Bradbury ferrying to politically unstable St. Petersburg as part of an exclusive international conference on the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.

WHEN ANGRY protesters voiced outrage about Anne Arundel County's decision to approve a large supermarket in a quiet town, they didn't hold back. The anti-growth group erected a 12-foot effigy of County Executive Janet Owens. A group member referred to Ms. Owens as the "queen of sprawl" and simply "Janet" at a County Council meeting. But that kind of excessive rudeness might sound tame to skewered Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy. She takes abuse -- even from the mayor of her city -- that no one should have to countenance.

Ordinary shoppers take grocery lists and coupons to the supermarket. In Columbia, they take talking points. In a community where local boards decide who can have a basketball hoop or lawn ornament, grocers get cartloads of unsolicited advice from customers and local officials, who believe the stores define their village - and their property values. Oakland Mills village officials prepared a two-page list of "Talking Points" for a meeting last year with Metro Food Market managers. "Crackers," the points note, "are still not on the [store directory]

DAMASCUS - Syria took another step to propel Bashar Assad to the presidency yesterday as the ruling Baath Party opened a milestone conference with a display of strong power and hints of future change. Assad sat expressionless among 1,200 delegates, hand on chin, as speaker after speaker praised his father, the late Hafez el Assad, and vowed to help their new leader follow in his footsteps. But the conference also called for a stronger drive against corruption, a movement Bashar Assad is seen as sponsoring, as well as calls for more openness.