A REVIEW OF ROGER SIMON’S AMERICAN REFUGEES FROM BRUCE BAWER: Those Who Move to a Different State: Roger Simon’s savvy book on the ongoing blue-state exodus. “I never thought of myself as a refugee by nature. But I was wrong, I guess. I did leave. And Roger did, too. And the book that resulted, American Refugees, is in equal parts delightful and distressing. Delightful, because Roger is by nature immune to pretense and abounding in humor, even when discussing topics that at first glance don’t seem particularly rib-tickling. He’s done a lot of hard thinking about his move to Nashville and has a lot to say about it, but he wears his learning lightly and doesn’t pose as an expert in anything whatsoever; on the contrary, his book is framed as a tale of a naif’s exploration and discovery — the story of a man who’s in his seventies but still unsure about a lot of things, still intensely curious, still eager to learn about and adapt to (and, in his own modest way, to try to push for small positive changes in) a new culture, and still ready to make new friends and play an active social and political role on what, until very recently, was, to him, utterly alien terrain. And he’s a man, may I add, who before he moved to Music City thought it was close enough to Knoxville that he’d be able to jump in his car and be having lunch with his UT law professor friend Glenn (‘Instapundit’) Reynolds a half hour or so later. Alas, no.”

A surprisingly common misconception. But heck, you can hardly get from Hollywood to Santa Monica in 30 minutes at lunchtime . . .