This is the third volume of the First of the Year annual series. Contributors such as Armond White, Philip Levine, Charles O'Brien, Uri Avnery, Donna Gaines, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer, and Amiri Baraka are back (and fractious as ever). And First's family of writers keeps growing. This volume includes vital new voices such as A. B. Spellman, Bernard Avishai, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Diane di Prima.

I: The Politics of Incongruity; Towards a Definition of Torture (and America); History in the Making; The Return of Staughton Lynd; "Shipwrecked on the Wrong Side of Tomorrow"; American Renaissance Criminals; Left Behind; "There's a New Left in Town"; Battles of Ajami; Nailing Avatar; From Hunger; The End of Sensitivity; Lover's Discourse; The Saddest Song Ever Sung; This Bit of Earth; All and Nothing; di Prima x 3; Homage to Guy Lombardo; Visiting Hours; 10 Song Demo; The Unknowable; On Hearing Sonny ("Newk") Rollins in the Park on a Hot Summer Night; Dear John Coltrane; Free at Last; Roundball Roundtable; WSQ Meets M'Boom; Snowblind; Why Murray the K Turned into Glenn Beck (and Dr. Dre); A Muy Macho Philly; II: Michael Jackson; 21st Century Renaissance; The Price; I Want to Be 10 Years Old and Sleep with Michael Jackson; On the Wisdom of Stopping When It's Enough; The Many Deaths of Michael Jackson; III: First Draft of History III; Indispensable Man; The Tone and the Music; Nationtime; His Cool World; Oybama; The Politics of Love; Who's to Blame II; Truth and Time; IV: Trips; Wurlitzer's World; Slow Fade; Between Illusion and Reality in the Dream Factory; Mike Leigh: Theatrical Neo-Realist; Rest Has Come to the Weary; Jesse Jackson and Black People; Justice; The Only World You Know; Iran ... or Persia?; The Future in the Past; Mystery & Anonymity; Memorial for Paine Day Banquet; The Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis; Autonomy or Barbarism; Bollinger's Whoppers