What I'm reading right now is Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made.

Finished The Culture of Fear. This book is a breath of fresh air -- all it says is that the bulk of media attention has focused on statistically insignificant problems (such as air disasters and school shootings) or nonexistent problems (such crack babies (don't exist) and single moms (not the scourge of civilization)) as ways for the public to avoid dealing with real, prosaic problems whose solutions are far more complicated (such as the widening gap between the rich and the poor). So ja, terrific book: evenhanded (liberals and conservatives get blasted more or less equally), funny, and full of revealing statistics (crime, specially crime committed by juveniles, is down -- teenage pregnancy is far lower than what it was in the 50s), and w/ clear-eyed assesments of how these fears are created (pseudo-experts, anecdotal evidence, self-feeding loops).