The former NC senator passed away at 1:15 this morning according to the Jesse Helms Center.

I’ve got a short contribution to this month’s issue of Boldtype.

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.”

-Seamus Heaney

I can’t tell you how weird it is to see a National Journal/NBC dateline from the town in which I grew up.

If this ad from the Discovery Channel doesn’t make your afternoon, I don’t know what will.

From the Times of London:

Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.

Here’s my question — what is the value of a single song when you have a device that is capable of holding damn near every album on iTunes?

Let me just say, I’ve got a lot of respect for this man’s skill set:

Were the ‘bitter’ remarks a mistake? Absolutely.

Do they offer ammunition to his opponents (on the right and on the left)? Without a doubt.

Is Barack Obama well-equipped to answer this challenge? You bet.

I loved Rick Perstein’s book about the Goldwater Revolution — Before the Storm — but merely liked his history of the Nixon presidency — Nixonland — a great deal. Ross Douthat has a great review in The Atlantic, which outlines the book’s many strengths but explains exactly why it has an underlying weakness at its heart.

Perlstein’s central thesis is that the nation’s 37th president ushered in a new phase of American life — Nixonland — in which the national consensus was shattered and domestic tranquility interrupted from then until now. Douthat writes:

This argument is one of Perlstein’s weakest—and it’s undercut, time and again, by his own skill as a historian and a writer. The chaotic tapestry he summons up—“hard hats” slugging hippies on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street, radical priests hatching bomb plots in the steam tunnels under Washington, D.C., riots consuming city after city, and national leaders going down under assassins’ bullets—is fascinating precisely because it feels so alien to our present political climate. Indeed, the age of Bush, supposedly unrivaled in its rancor, seems like a peaceable kingdom when contrasted with the madhouse in which Richard Nixon rose to power. We have a culture war; they had a war.

Exactly.

The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll is easily the best piece of nonfiction I’ve read so far this year. As I was tearing through it, I kept trying to decide whether this book is actually more impressive than Coll’s last — Ghost Wars — which one the Pulitzer Prize.

Now that I’ve finished the final page, I believe it is.

Toward the end of The Bin Ladens, Coll writes:

An FBI analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment of the evidence in a breezy e-mail written in September 2003: There are ‘millions’ of Bin Ladens ‘running around’ and ‘99.999999% of them are of the non-evil variety’

Osama’s father, Mohammed Bin Laden, died in a plane crash in 1967, but his life was nothing short of remarkable. When he left home to seek his fortune, his situation was so desperate that he spent his nights sleeping in a ditch with his younger brother, but gradually, through a combination of luck and hard work, he built a career as the chief builder for the Saudi king. When he died, he left behind a construction empire and more than 50 children. Those children, led first by the London-educated Salem and then the University of Miami-graduate Bakr, extended his legacy and carved out an original place in a rapidly-changing world.

Coll manages to offer a comprehensive and engaging portrait of this entire family. To do so, he taps a mind-boggling wealth of resources and interviews — drawing from first-person accounts, government reports, even financial statements from a divorce proceeding in Los Angeles. The result is riveting and important — I’m positive that people will be reading this book for years in hopes of understanding the world as it has become.

Jay Bilas, once again showing why he is the best in the business: