“No other art movement in human history has so thoroughly confounded the deeply held concepts of public and private property; no other art movement has so thoroughly made itself a public-policy issue.” (Gastman & Neelon) p.23

Often times, young Americans who are on the fringe of the mainstream, and use art as a vehicle of cultural and political commentary are directly linked to a particular moment or event.  They are seen as direct descendants of one of the more critically romanticized groups in the American history of counter-culture.  Chronologically, we primarily associate and compare present day American youth culture to post-WWII artistic movements.  But our collective cultural memory tends to have gaps.  This period we often credit for birthing the creativity, activism and expression of the present is often bracketed between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War.

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s full of interesting figures with dreams — struggling actors and writers who wait tables, walk dogs or sell insurance on the side.

In the 1980s and early ‘90s, Leonard Mlodinow was likely one of the most unexpected: a theoretical physicist-turned-scriptwriter.

When TV action hero MacGyver or the Starship Enterprise crew needed new dilemmas to solve, the UC Berkeley-trained scientist was there to supply them.

“I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays,” said the best-selling science writer on a recent sunny afternoon at Caltech, where he’s a lecturer. He was describing his early career at Caltech, in 1981, and why he left for Hollywood. “I was 25 and had really great opportunities in academia, but I kept thinking, ‘I’m in L.A. Hollywood’s not far away!’ I had encouraging experience with a screenplay so I decided to take a chance.”

The Tea Fire was raging across the hills of Montecito, and T.C. Boyle was worried. He was worried about the safety of his home, as anyone near the flames would be, and that concern was amplified by the fact that the nearly century-old house was designed by no less than Frank Lloyd Wright. And then there were the papers: the highly combustible manuscripts, research, notes and bound volumes that constitute Boyle’s life’s work. Everything that had gone into writing two dozen books and 150 stories was stashed in Boyle’s basement. If the wind shifted, it would all be lost.

“It scared the bejesus out of me,” Boyle said four years later.

Although the Tea Fire claimed more than 200 homes, it never reached Boyle’s. And now Boyle’s archive has found a safe house of its own: at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Ransom Center, the premier collector of the complete papers of 20th and 21st century novelists, paid $425,000 to add Boyle’s archive to its collection.

The Justice Department filed suit last week against Apple Inc. and two major book publishers, Macmillan and Penguin Group USA, accusing them of colluding in 2010 to raise the prices of e-books. Three other publishers that were investigated — Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins — agreed to a settlement, which Sharis A. Pozen, the acting director of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said “will begin to undo the harm caused by the companies’ anticompetitive conduct, and will restore price competition so that consumers can pay lower prices for their e-books.”

Not likely. What this lawsuit probably will do instead is return to Amazon the power to monopolize the e-book market through predatory pricing to the detriment of publishers, authors and, ultimately, readers.

Anyone who has friends or family members with young girls has surely heard the lament—“she’ll only wear pink”. Well, the thing is, from tutus to leggings to skirts, there is only really pink garb for her to choose from at the store. Is the little girl or the clothes manufacturer the chicken or the egg? And when did pink become the de facto girls’ color anyway?

The topic may seem most appropriate for a fluff piece on Today. But Jo B. Paoletti is an academic, and Pink and Blue is meticulously researched, with references to paper dolls, old retail catalogs and the arcane field of material culture studies. Her findings are fascinating, even if her prose can be repetitive.