Aside from herself, Conan O'Brien, Seth Green, Stephen Colbert, and David Cross read on the audio version. That right there is enough to make the content not even matter. But it does. This is my introduction to Sarah Vowell and my favorite of her work.

I especially remember the story about Concord High School in New Hampshire inviting all the 2000 presidential candidates to speak. Half accepted, including Al Gore. This was 1999, the same year as Columbine, and the candidates were asked to speak about violent crime. After Gore spoke, Vowell interviewed some of the students about his speech. Many of them were impressed, telling how they felt he respected them as people and didn't just view them as kids.

He talked about the importance of the insulation of a loving family and how that might keep someone immune from committing those types of things (school shootings). Then, there was a Q&A. One of the kids asked how high school students could become more involved in politics. Gore went on to talk about how there's a lot of cynicism in the world, especially among youth. He then encouraged the kids to look inside themselves and see how lucky they are to live in this country. He talked about long voting lines in new democracies like S. Africa where people waited hours to vote, as opposed to here in the US where we have low voter turnout.

Further encouraging the kids to get involved, he told the story of Love Canal. How a high school student had written him a letter 20 years ago about how her family was getting sick and she believed the water coming from her well was contaminated. This encouraged Gore to look for other contaminated water sites and clean up hazardous dump sites. He said to the kids that "It (Love Canal) was the one that started it all", and was misquoted in the paper the next morning as saying "I was the one that started it all". Aside from that being an anecdote about the power of the media to spin things out of control, what's so touching about the way Vowell shares the story is how upset the kids were that an experience that had been so positive and a story that was meant to be motivating was turned into this cheap, salacious news piece about what a liar Al Gore is. No talk about what he'd said about school violence, no talk about how he'd encouraged the kids to get involved and to not take their status as an American citizen for granted. Just - Al Gore's a big fat liar who claims to have invented the internet, was the real life person behind Ryan O'Neal's character in Love Story, and discovered Love Canal.