Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

The clerk at my neighborhood store thinks I'm eccentric because I'd rather read yesterday's New York Times than today's Seattle Post Intelligencer. He'll say, "Today's Times hasn't come in yet; that's yesterday's." I tell him, "I prefer the writing in the Times." To which he replies, "But that's yesterday's news!"

Similarly, this collection of Codrescu's essays on NPR's All Things Considered between 1989 and 1993 may strike you at first as cute but now irrelevant two-page vignettes about current events no longer current. But Codrescu grew up in totalitarian Communist Bloc Romania, and his antennae are continually honing in on the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which events are defined, filtered, massaged, and reported by the media -- and how in turn the media define, filter, and massage us into numbness: zombification. These are timeless essays about the eternal dysfunctional codependency of power and belief. Highly Recommended.