Hope & History Rhyme

With her direct access to the first couple and unparalleled connections to White House staff, as well as D.C. and Chicago power brokers, Rogers is considered by many to be the key to Brand Obama. She stands at the center of the careful marketing of the first family and an administration-wide effort to make the White House appear a hip and accessible abode. Mrs. Obama’s press team manages a media blitz that includes cover shots on People, Vogue and Oprah’s O magazine, among others, while Rogers controls the day-to-day development and execution of the brand. The former marketing executive must create a White House that helps Americans visualize Mr. Obama’s campaign promises of change and transparency.

Rogers, who ran an online social-networking unit at Allstate Financial, served as president of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, a Chicago utility, and at age 31 headed the Illinois State Lottery, manages to speak with both the confidence of a top executive and the casualness of a woman who can’t be bothered with business.

Above all, Rogers is a world-class networker—the ultimate social engineer, not just planning White House dinner parties as well as her own intimate soirees but also connecting powerful people in her orbit. Over the years, she has immersed herself in Chicago’s charity circuit and developed a wide-ranging circle of friends, including senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Linda Johnson Rice, head of the company that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines. She has also tapped her connections over the years to help advance friends’ political interests. Rogers held parties at her house and called former classmates from Harvard and long-standing friends in New Orleans during the 2008 campaign to help raise as much as $200,000 for Mr. Obama’s presidential bid, according to federal records. “She’s been a social engineer from the beginning,” says Shawnelle Richie, a friend and Chicago-based television executive for a division of CBS. “It’s beyond parties, it’s the way she connects with people.”

AMY CHOZICK, The Wall Street Journal Magazine

http://magazine.wsj.com/features/the-big-interview/desiree-rogers/

“21st Century Breakdown” follows Green Day’s “American Idiot,” the politically charged concept album from 2004 that has sold more than five million copies domestically and an estimated 12 million worldwide. Mr. Dirnt said, “When you get to the top of the mountain you look out and you take a deep breath and go: ‘Wow, this is amazing. I don’t want to go back down now.’ ”

He added: “Maybe we garnered confidence from ‘American Idiot,’ but it was by no means cocky. And yeah, we were scared and nervous.”

But “American Idiot” left Green Day determined to top itself — and with “21st Century Breakdown,” the band has done just that. The music is more expansive in every way, encompassing more styles and arriving in a newly spacious, three-dimensional production.

At a time when younger punk-pop bands are singing about girl trouble and professional envy, Green Day has dared to offer something far denser and more demanding: a whirlwind of thoughts about activism, redemption and destruction. The rage and sorrows of “American Idiot” are pushed even further in “21st Century Breakdown,” in songs where idealism and the urge to annihilate are constantly grappling, never far apart.

JON PARELES, The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/arts/music/03pare.html

The bane of Africa is war, but the number of conflicts tearing apart the continent has dwindled. The murderous old buffoons like Idi Amin are gone, and we’re steadily seeing the rise of highly skilled technocrats, who accept checks on their power and don’t regard the treasury as their private piggy bank. The Rwandan cabinet room is far more high-tech than the White House cabinet room, and when you talk to new leaders like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia you can’t help wondering about investing your 401(k) in Liberian stocks.

Richard Dowden’s “Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles” aims in part to correct the negative stereotypes. Dowden, a veteran British journalist who now heads the Royal African Society, has been bouncing around the continent since 1971 and covers a great deal of ground. Much of the text is travelogue that I found a yawn. But Dowden is at his best when looking at grand themes — like the degree to which Africa is more promising than journalists or aid workers often acknowledge.

“The media’s problem is that, by covering only disasters and wars, it gives us only that image of the continent,” Dowden writes — and 90 percent of the Africans reading this are now nodding at that line. “Persistent images of starving children and men with guns have accumulated into our narrative of the continent.”

NICHOLAS KRISTOF, The New York Times Review of Books

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/books/review/Kristof-t.html