Joel Belz asks, “Are poor people poor because they’re paying the price for their own personal failures—or because the systems in which they find themselves have been broken and have failed the people within them?” A new book offers a sound, biblical answer.

Authors Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson have a book released today on last year’s election, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election. World’s blog points to some details about who John McCain had on his vice-presidential running mates list and how those who vetted Mrs. Palin believed she could be a great VP, though probably not on Day One. “She had knocked some of the broader questions out of the park, [former White House counsel A.B. Culvahouse] told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on Jan. 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are.”

On The Politico, the authors discuss Senator Kennedy’s reaction to former president Bill Clinton’s treatment of candidate Obama.

Beauty was once the goal, at least in part, of art, music, and poetry. Now, it is the antithesis of them, states Roger Scruton, who has written a book on the subject.

Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.

The Essential Adventure Library: 50 Non-fiction Adventure Books

James Bowman writes about a book called, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness: “In seeking some scientific sanction for proclaiming his case of jaundice a true and factual picture of the world, the professor has provided us with a good illustration of how bitterness generally is self-generated in a way that real illness can hardly be.”

Obit Magazine has a short article on Milton S. Hershey and the new museum in his honor. It isn’t discussed here, but I think a good book or movie could be made of the rivalry between Hershey and Franklin Mars. Of course, it would have to involve aliens at some point, but you know, that’s expected.