It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made.

"annexed Hawaii Puerto Rico and Guam and invaded Cuba and then the Philippines becoming a meddling self-serving militaristic international superpower practically overnight. Her writing has been publiSarah Vowelld in The Village Voice Esquire GQ Spin The New York Times Los Angeles Times and the SF Weekly and Sarah Vowell has been a regular contributor to the online magazine Salon. In 2005 Vowell served as a guest columnist for The New York Times during several weeks in July briefly filling in for Maureen Dowd.

Sarah Jane Vowell (born December 27 1969) is an American author journalist essayist and social commentator. Often referred to as a "social observer" Vowell has written six nonfiction books on American history and culture most recently Unfamiliar FiSarah Vowells which was publiSarah Vowelld in 2011. She was also the voice of Violet in the animated film The Incredibles.