LIKE ANY great drama, the ITV docu-soap Airline hinges on irreconcilable conflict. The last of the present series about no- frills carrier easyJet finished this week as it began, with two recurring themes: confrontation with passengers who turn up late and get cross when...

The United States may be the world's largest economy and greatest military power, but it depends,on a ceaseless flow of oil from other countries--about 9 million barrels arriving every day, enough to fill a hole the size of a football field 1,000 feet...

Billy Joel's late-Seventies records have revealed a songwriter with a fair amount of wit, a tough, unsentimental view of generational and class concerns…. [It] should be obvious that, compared with his commercial competition—the Styxs, REO Speedwagons, and Journeys that glut our airwaves and pretty much define mainstream above-ground rock—the guy comes off as a genius. Or at least an honest, respectable craftsman. That said, Joel's new … album, "The Nylon Cur...

"Goodnight Saigon," the turning point of Billy Joel's ambitious new album [The Nylon Curtain], may well be remembered as the ultimate pop-music epitaph to the Vietnam War. (p. 71) While "Goodnight Saigon" is The Nylon Curtain's stunner, there are other songs in which Joel's blue-collar smarts, Broadway theatricality and rock attitude blend perfectly. "Allentown," his portrait of a crumbling Pennsylvania mining city in which the American dream ha...

"The Nylon Curtain" is Billy Joel's "Magical Mystery Tour." (p. 85) Allentown is the album at its high point, with Joel's chunky piano rhythm complemented by assembly-line sound effects that conjure a cartoon factory where a whistle sticks fingers in its own mouth to call the troops to work. The scene, however, isn't comic, for this is a plant that is wilting, and a town that's dying while its young people ask, "What happened?" There�...